“Hotel du Lac” the Booker Prize-winning novel by Anita Brookner: Out-of-character behavior and possible memory gaps suggest multiple personality

A fiction writer, Edith, just as her wedding is about to commence, flees without explanation, which so outrages everyone that she is exiled from England to the respectable Hotel du Lac in Switzerland.

Her outrageous behavior, the pivotal event of the novel, is never explained, even in Edith’s private thoughts, from which I infer that neither the character nor the author understood it.

Indeed, both Edith’s engagement to marry and her outrageous behavior are so out of character for her that, to me, they suggest actions of alternate personalities.

She says, “I am a serious woman who should know better and am judged by my friends to be past the age of indiscretion; several people have remarked upon my physical resemblance to Virginia Woolf…I make no claims for my particular sort of writing, although I understand that it is going quite well. I have held this rather dim and trusting personality together for a considerable length of time…And no doubt after a curative stay in this grey solitude…I shall be allowed back…and to revert to what I was before I did that apparently dreadful thing, although, frankly, once I had done it I didn’t give it another thought” (1, pp. 8-9).

Had she fled the marriage ceremony in a “dissociative fugue” (search it), similar to the small, trivial one she had when “She scarcely remembered getting back to the hotel” (1, p. 155)?

Added June 5th: Memorably cynical comment by protagonist, that her daily task as fiction writer is fantasy and “obfuscation” (1, p. 50).

1. Anita Brookner. Hotel du Lac. New York, Vintage, 1984/1995.