LITTLE BETTER THAN U

I greatly enjoyed The Secret Author’s tirade against the lack of bourgeois life in contemporary literary fiction [“WHY MODERN NOVELS ARE SO BORING”, FEB].

I fear we are unlikely to see anything as brilliant as Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful

The Line of Beauty (2004) in the crop of novels published this year. Indeed, I doubt such a book would even be published now.

Is there something to be said for literary depictions of aristocratic life? The Patrick

Melrose novels do not succeed because they conform to middle-class mores, and gothic literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does not get its flair from well-lived lives in suburban villas.

It is true that the likes of Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins continually explore the tensions between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and their plots are driven by middle-class mobility. But, one has to recognise that no small part of their drama derives purely from castles, titles, and rakish younger sons of dukes and viscounts. William Prior

London