David Lodge wrote “Nice Work” in which the two main figures are a woman (Robyn Penrose) and a man (Vic as in Victor).  

In chapter number two, the novelist presents the second character. Right from the start he clarifies that Robyn Penrose, a Temporary Lecturer  in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, does not believe in the concept of character. In her opinion a character is a bourgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism.

She puts into evidence the similarity between capitalistic history and the growth of the novel success: in the eighteen century, the rise of the novel coincided with the rise of capitalism, in the nineteen century the triumph of novel coincided with the triumph of capitalism and at the end the modernist and post-modernist deconstruction of the classical novel in the twentieth century coincided with the terminal crisis of capitalism.

According to Robyn Penrose both capitalism and writing novels are expressions of an individual self who seeks happiness and fortune and is in competition with other individual selves.

She feels that novelist are capitalists of imagination since they invent needs into the minds of consumers. The novelist adds that Robyn Penrose would add the example that the first great novelist were at the same time great capitalists such as: Daniel Defoe, an English novelist and merchant and Samuel Richardson another great English novelist and a printer too.

Robyn Penrose believes that there is no such thing as the self which is a finite, unique soul or essence that constitutes a person’s identity. She believes that “you are what speaks you” that could be summed up as a semiotic materialism. She is a feminist and seems to have the same human feelings as anyone else, therefore the novelist decides to treat her as a character.

The novelist carries on telling about her day. She woke up at 7.30 and her anxieties reached her mind. However she has a rational mind and does not get out of control. It was the first day of the winter term and she had a lecture to deliver and two tutorials to conduct. She enjoys a lot her job and hope to keep on doing her work till the end of her life. In order to calm herself she did some exercise and at the same time she thought about Charles who wasn’t there beside her. The novelist speaks directly to the reader telling him/her that he would tell him/her later the most salient facts of Robyn Penrose’s biography.