She is, after all, a product of the now-discredited postwar idealism. In ''the brave new world of Welfare State and County Scholarships,'' she and her friends were ''the elite, the chosen, the garlanded of the great social dream.'' ''The Radiant Way'' begins with a 1979 New Year's Eve party at Liz's house, a slightly ambivalent celebration of the new post-idealist era. It is a time of winnowing. The language of Darwin and Herbert Spencer is of use. In the course of the novel, characters of foreign extraction leave the country, a working-class professor finds himself returned to the north and toil at the educational coalface with the disadvantaged and illiterate.
Brahmins fall back on old resources, finding what comfort they can in wealth and advantage.
Lady Henrietta Latchett makes her feel like a peasant and steals her husband. But in the end Liz triumphs quite effortlessly. But Liz has found she prefers the company of her cat. The matter of her origins is altogether more perplexed, however. Liz knows nothing of her father, and her mother has something below-stairs about her and is somehow traumatized into virtual speechlessness and immobility.