Instead, she had composed this convincing work of realist fiction on the basis of research in the British Library and her book owed its existence to other books. In the end the reviewers managed to uncover a biographical explanation for this puzzling fact: Penney had once suffered from agoraphobia. Their discovery had the reassuring effect of rooting the work in the author’s life after all, if obliquely, but it did not succeed in suppressing the intertextual origins of the novel itself. In practice, authors are also readers, or they could not write in a way their own readers would understand, and they learn from books.

On the basis of this anxiety, secular postmodernity perversely reverts to the old religious vocabulary of guilt and sacrifice, responsibility and calling to account. Arguably, none of this heavy insistence on ethics is required to make human beings care about one another. True, greed exercises its own powerful counter-imperative but, in cases when the profit motive intervenes to stop people valuing each other, ethics doesn’t get much of a look-in anyway. Economics apart, answers to the question how to live are not so difficult to come by that we need to treat all the world’s stories as parables.

In English departments the recent turn to ethics seems to me to register a degree of panic. ‘God is dead. ’ On the basis of this anxiety, secular postmodernity perversely reverts to the old religious vocabulary of guilt and sacrifice, responsibility and calling to account. Arguably, none of this heavy insistence on ethics is required to make human beings care about one another. True, greed exercises its own powerful counter-imperative but, in cases when the profit motive intervenes to stop people valuing each other, ethics doesn’t get much of a look-in anyway.