The Latterday Sortes Virgilianae: Confirmation Bias and the Image of the Poet in The Stranger’s Child

Abstract

Perhaps even more thoroughly than Hollinghurst’s earlier fiction, The Stranger’s Child absorbs and redistributes the visual vocabulary of modern gay writing in a process first observed when Joseph Bristow noted that The Swimming-Pool Library ‘[contrives] to produce a history that maps some of the cardinal shifts and transitions in gay men’s lives in the twentieth century’.¹ The ‘history [of] gay men’s lives’ — as mapped out through Will Beckwith’s movements towards a fuller understanding of the past and his particular implications in it — becomes further complicated in The Stranger’s Child, a volume that, in many ways, complements and completes the thematic trajectory of Hollinghurst’s debut novel.