Autumn champions art as an essential, subversive force capable of preserving a more truthful and humane record of history than official, sanitized narratives. Through the rediscovered work of the real-life 1960s pop artist Pauline Boty, the novel presents art as a counter-history that celebrates joy, sensuality, and marginalized female perspectives. Boty’s vivid, critical, and often playful creations stand in stark contrast to the rigid, male-dominated establishment of her time, an establishment whose legacy of erasure and control connects powerfully with the political climate of 2016. Art, in this framework, is an act of resistance, offering a means of reclaiming stories that have been deliberately lost or ignored.

The novel establishes the subversive power of art by first showing its deliberate erasure. When Elisabeth, an art-history lecturer, discovers Boty’s work, she’s met with dismissal from her male academic tutor, who insists that there were no significant female British pop artists and labels Boty’s work as being of “minor interest.” This mirrors the real historical neglect of Boty, whose paintings were lost for decades after her early death. The novel contrasts this act of institutional erasure with the destruction of art, as seen in the story of the art historian Anthony Blunt, who purchased and destroyed all of Stephen Ward’s portraits from a gallery to erase an inconvenient artistic record of the political figures involved in the Profumo Affair. These examples frame the preservation and rediscovery of art as a political act, a fight to keep a complete, uncensored version of the past alive.

Daniel’s memories and descriptions reveal how Boty’s art engaged directly and critically with her time. He recalls her collages and paintings, which repurposed media images of figures like Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Christine Keeler. This has had a profound influence on the way Daniel sees the world, leading him to declare that he has only ever fallen in love with Boty’s eyes. This is a metaphorical way of suggesting that he aspires to see the world as she does, considering perspectives other than his own, to see how he can think of others more thoughtfully. Consequently, this informs his relationship with Elisabeth, in which he teaches her to see storytelling as a way of creating the world. Later, as Elisabeth begins her research on Boty’s forgotten work, she becomes disillusioned with the detachment of her academic writing as a contribution to the “objective” record of official history. Instead, Elisabeth leans into the emotional reality of her engagement with Boty’s work to guide her life. Elisabeth finds in Boty’s work a “lifeforce” capable of “blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space” (239). This vision of art as a joyful, resilient force provides an essential contrast to the division and despair of the post-referendum world.

Elisabeth practices her own method of subversion through art, creating a performance to reclaim Daniel’s lost art from the corporate institutions who benefit from the artist’s labor. By threatening legal action against the supermarket for co-opting Daniel’s work for profit, she overcomes, in her own way, the cynical opportunism that pervades the post-referendum Britain she lives in. This restores her hope while also helping her to feel that she has worked to restore her relationship with Daniel. By recovering both Boty’s story and Daniel’s work, Elisabeth reclaims a legacy of creativity and resistance that offers a powerful alternative to the patriarchal, cynical, and divisive forces dominating her own era.