Between reality and rationalization lies...class war

I think I live somewhere between reality and rationalization, but I could merely be whining, or trying to excuse a poor work ethic. Success in the things that matter to me seems so elusive. Is it a failure in me? Or a distortion in the world around me? Am I to blame? Or is the world in some way unfair?

I confess I don't know the answer. But I do know that I find Hermione Lee's piece in today's Manchester Guardian to be deeply distrurbing and, yes, even depressing. The critical paragraph goes like this:

Penelope Knox came from a writing family, "a family where everyone was publishing, or about to publish", and has written about that environment with eloquence, tenderness and wit in The Knox Brothers and in pieces about her childhood. Her uncles – the cryptographer and classics don Dillwyn, the Anglican priest Wilfred, the famous Roman Catholic convert Ronald – were intellectuals of idiosyncratic brilliance, competitive, eccentric and learned. Her aunt, Winifred Peck, was a prolific and talented novelist in the Angela Thirkell vein. Her father, "Evoe" Knox, was the editor of Punch and a fine comic journalist. Her mother, who died when Penelope was 18, had been an English student at Somerville College, Oxford, and wrote abridgments of classic literature (Pilgrim's Progress, The Pickwick Papers) for schools. Her stepmother Mary was a gifted artist, the daughter of the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, EH Shepard. Her brother Rawle, a dominant and energetic character as a boy, became a journalist after his incarceration in a Japanese prison-of-war-camp. He also wrote a life of Shepard in 1979, to which Penelope contributed a vivid chapter. They had collaborated before, like many middle-class children of their era, on a nursery magazine. As a child, Penelope was an early reader ("I was praised, and since then have never been praised so much") and an early writer.

I'm sure Penelope Knox was an excellent writer, and her novels are probably worth reading, but they are not the types of things I read and they most certainly are not the types of things I would ever write. How could I? My family looks nothing like that. No acclaimed writers or illustrious converts to Catholicism. No classics dons or cryptographers. No Oxford abridgers, brilliant eccentrics, illustrators or gifted artists. Not a one. Not anywhere in the family tree.

So I am left to wonder if the grandchild of a coal-mining Welsh farmer, the daughter of a Toronto carpenter, the niece of a self-employed Dundee painter, or the great-grandchild of Presbyterian school teachers from the Kingdom of Fife could ever succeed in the literary world that embraces Penelope Knox.

I think not. And I think it's mainly a class thing.

But then again, maybe I'm just not working hard enough.