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‘Entitled’, in the sense currently on everyone's lips (‘believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment’¹), is an adjective. A phrase such as ‘a group of older, rather entitled, people’, for example, makes this unmistakable both by placing it in front of the noun and by treating it as gradable (i.e. if you can be said to be ‘rather’ entitled, or ‘very’ entitled, or ‘less’ entitled than someone else, then ‘entitled’ is definitely an adjective).² So it is interesting to find that the OED mostly presents the word not as an adjective at all, but as a form of the verb ‘to entitle’. For example, I may be ‘entitled to compensation’, or I may read a periodical ‘entitled Critical Quarterly’, and in usages of this kind, the active verb is not far away: my circumstances entitle me to the compensation; Cox and Dyson founded a magazine and entitled it Critical Quarterly. When the word works in this verb-like fashion, it is formally incomplete until it arrives at its complement: the volume is entitled … what? the claimant is entitled … what to? The pure adjective, on the contrary, makes it possible to say that someone is entitled tout court.

In thus marginalising the word's adjectival potential, the OED is doing no more than reflecting its material. The verb can be traced back into Middle English and beyond; the adjective, with one or two technical exceptions, is not attested until the mid-twentieth century. Even now that it is fashionable, it is far from dominant. For instance, a recent searchable one-month run of The Times yields 50 occurrences of the word ‘entitled’, of which 31 are part of the phrase ‘entitled to’, 13 are synonymous with ‘named’, and only 6 are examples of the adjective.³ It is, you could say, a niche meaning; it remains to be seen whether it will establish itself or start to sound dated.

The niche seems to have been originally carved out by a specific incident. The OED's first citations, for the relevant sense of both ‘entitled’ and ‘entitlement’, are taken from the writings of the child psychologist Robert Coles, who in the 1960s and 1970s published Children of Crisis, a Pulitzer Prize-winning survey of the social and psychological condition of the USA's children.⁴ He described the experience of childhood in various social groups and in the final volume turned his attention to the offspring of the rich. He insisted on the diversity of this class: like any other cross-section of kids, they displayed unpredictably varying values, characters and degrees of happiness and unhappiness. All the same, he identified a particular mindset which they seemed to him to share, and his chosen term for this was ‘entitlement’.⁵

It came out of a conversation with a lawyer in New Orleans, who was reflecting on his daughter's confidence that she would be in the Mardi Gras parade; his

The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin by Nonia Williams (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)

Interspersed between the chapters of literary criticism in Nonia Williams’s monograph The Precarious Writing of Ann Quin (2023) are brief ‘biographical vignettes’ that centre on distinct components of the life of British experimental writer Ann Quin (1936–1973).¹ One of these vignettes, entitled ‘A bedsit room of her own’, details Quin’s meagre education, poorly paid secretarial jobs and confined living spaces. Expanding on the Virginia Woolf reference in its title, 'A bedsit room of her own' contrasts Woolf’s 1920s feminist hope with Quin’s 1960s reality:

This passage invites us to reflect on the relationship between material precarity and literary creativity. Williams acknowledges Woolf’s belief that the two are inversely related—in other words, that material deprivation precludes creativity—while hinting that, in Quin’s case, the situation might be more complex.

In its Introduction, Williams’s monograph testifies to how Quin’s experimental novels resist the realist mode deemed acceptable for working-class writers in her time (p. 7). Williams quotes the novelist Claire-Louise Bennett’s intriguing claim that ‘growing up in a working-class environment may well engender an aesthetic sensibility that quite naturally produces work that is idiosyncratic, polyvocal, and apparently experimental’.² By claiming that Quin’s ‘living conditions […] were profoundly and inextricably bound up with and in the specific experimental forms of [her] writing’ (pp. 7–8), Williams likewise entertains the possibility that it was precisely Quin’s impoverished conditions that stimulated her literary experimentalism. This connection offers a compelling premise for Williams’s study of Quin.

The monograph's emphasis on the adjective ‘precarious’, which features in its title, further ties together a material experience and a literary aesthetic. Williams states that this key word ‘intentionally refers to […] both Quin’s lived experience—such as her volatile material conditions, sexual and emotional life, mental states and more—and the experimentalism of the writing’ (p. 6). In her focus on the concept of precarity, Williams is tapping into a salient cultural issue. In 2012, Noam Chomsky referred to the rise of the ‘precariat’: a new social demographic, composed of ‘people who live a precarious existence’, which he saw as ‘becoming a very substantial part of society in the United States and indeed elsewhere’.³ The Guardian similarly reported, in 2019, that ‘a new “precariat” is forming across Europe: millions of people who have jobs but still can’t quite make ends meet’.⁴ By centring her analysis on the term ‘precarious’, Williams reminds us that Quin—a writer who spent most of her literary career living from one pay cheque to the next, with occasional financial relief in the form of gr