Bad Dreams Study Guide

Tessa Hadley was born in Bristol, England in 1956. Her father was a teacher and a jazz trumpeter, and her mother was an amateur artist. After completing two degrees in English and education at Cambridge University, she married in 1982 and moved to Wales with her husband, Eric Hadley, who lectured at universities there. Though Hadley wrote several novels in her first 10 years of marriage while also raising several children, none of her books were published until 2002, after she’d completed a master’s degree in creative writing and a PhD. Hadley has published eight novels and three short story collections for adults, as well as two children’s short story collections alongside her husband. She has won major literary awards, including the O. Henry Prize and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, and is a Fellow of both the Welsh Academy and the Royal Society of Literature. She is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Hadley often draws from her own life to inform the plots and characters of her stories. In this case, her father was a teacher and a trumpet player, and her mother was an artist, though never pursued art professionally. “Bad Dreams” depicts a married couple with very similar professions and interests, delving into the tension felt especially by the mother, whose frustration at having to prioritize mothering and housekeeping instead of painting seems to grow overnight. Hadley has said in interviews that she struggled at first with writing in her own voice, about events similar to her own life, but authors such as Alice Munro, who focus on domestic settings, seemed to give her the permission she needed to do so. She has also described the struggle of deeply wanting to spend her time writing, but needing to devote her attention to her small children—a feeling of frustration at not being able to indulge one’s creative interests that readers can compare to her depiction of the mother character in “Bad Dreams.”

“Bad Dreams” is the titular story of Hadley’s third most recent short story collections, following Sunstroke and Other Stories and Married Love and Other Stories. Most of Hadley’s fiction focuses on domestic life, and because of this, she’s been compared to the Canadian writer Alice Munro, who has published several collections of short stories, including The Love of a Good Woman. Critics have often commented on Hadley having been 46 when she published her first book, though she holds up Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first novel, The Golden Child, when she was 60 years old, as proof that many successful authors have published their debuts even later. For her PhD thesis, Hadley studied the works of Henry James, known for his late-19th and early-20th century novels and novellas including The Portrait of a Lady. Swallows and Amazons, the favorite novel of the story’s young protagonist, was written by Arthur Ransome and published in 1930.