Jennifer Johnston, 95, Novelist Who Probed Ireland's Fault Lines, Dies

New York Times

13-03-2025

Jennifer Johnston, an admired Irish novelist whose precise, carefully woven fictions depicted historic fault lines in her country's upper crust and frailties in its latter-day middle class, died on Feb. 25 in Dun Laoghaire, outside Dublin. She was 95.
Her death, in a nursing home, was announced by President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland, who praised her 'deep and meaningful examination of the nature and limitations of identity, family and personal connections' in 20th-century Ireland.
Ms. Johnston's specialty was depicting the wounds of memory and the frustrations and disappointments beneath an apparently genteel coexistence of the social classes and within families, especially in the Protestant Anglo-Irish upper strata — hurts that sometimes boiled over into violence. She was herself born into a Protestant family.
These themes were explored in nearly two dozen novels and a dozen plays, in settings that would become deeply familiar to her readers.
Perhaps her most enduring novel is 'How Many Miles to Babylon?' (1974), which looks at a forbidden friendship across the class divide set against upper-class unease during World War I. 'Fool's Sanctuary' (1987) explores what can go wrong beneath the gilded surfaces of the big country house.
'The location, always in Ireland, may be in the country or Dublin. The setting may be a big house or a cottage, and almost certainly a lonely beach by the sea will be part of the story,' the critic Sarah Curtis wrote in The Times Literary Supplement about Ms. Johnston's fiction, in a review of her book 'This is Not a Novel' (2002).
That well-used scene-making sometimes exasperated critics across the ocean; indeed, Ms. Johnston was better known and appreciated in her native Ireland and in the United Kingdom than in America.
Her fellow Irish writers cherished her. At a memorial service for her in Dublin's Trinity Theater, the novelist Roddy Doyle called her 'Ireland's greatest writer.' She won Britain's prestigious Whitbread Book Award for the novel 'The Old Jest' in 1979, and she had been shortlisted for the even more noteworthy Booker Prize two years earlier, for 'Shadows on Our Skin.'
'She has for a quarter-century been turning out superior fictions that both embody the wounds of Irish life — its struggle to escape from religious, colonial and cultural domination — and offer the luxury of writing about things beyond its immediate orbit,' the critic John Walsh wrote in The Independent in 1998.
Ms. Johnston herself was modest about her achievements. In a remembrance published in The Irish Times after her death, her son Patrick Smyth, a longtime journalist there, recalled her once writing, ''All I know how to do is tell stories.''
'She would start writing in the late 1960s, saying later it was the only way she could see of escaping domesticity and its isolation,' he wrote.
Recalling her first novel, 'The Captain and the Kings' (1972), which won an Author's Club award, recognizing the year's most promising debut novel published in Britain (she was 42 at the time), Ms. Johnston told the Irish state broadcaster RTÉ in 2015:
'I was so delighted to find that I could write on a typewriter, and I was so delighted to find that somebody who had nothing to do with me at all had said, 'You can write.' And I was determined to show them, yes, I could. And the bloody book won a prize. And it was more exciting than having my first child.'
The virtues, and perhaps the limits, of Ms. Johnston's style are illustrated in 'How Many Miles to Babylon?,' which is brisk and fast-paced like her other works. She is efficient and descriptive in this book, immediately equipping the reader with the necessary background information about her characters and their social situations. She tends to tell rather than show: 'I was isolated from the surrounding children of my own age by the traditional barriers of class and education,' says the principal character, an isolated upper-class child who is brought up in a country house and goes on to become an officer.
The BBC adapted the novel in 1982 for a television series starring Daniel Day-Lewis.
Ms. Johnston's writing sometimes exasperated critics in the United States.
Reviewing her novel about a spinsterish, unsuccessful Irish writer who meets a Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor on holiday in Italy, Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times in 1982: 'It won't do any harm for me to give away some of the plot of 'The Christmas Tree,' because there are no surprises in it anyway. She hasn't shown us a surprise, a quirk, a style all her own, a moment that sticks in the mind.'
Other critics, however, found virtues in her prose. Marigold Johnson, reviewing 'How Many Miles to Babylon?' in the TLS in 1974, called Ms. Johnston's writing 'a delicate mixture of pathos and caustic, loving observation.'
Jennifer Prudence Johnston was born in Dublin on Jan. 12, 1930, to Denis Johnston, an actor and playwright well known in Ireland, and Shelah Richards, an actress.
A troubled, distant relationship with her playwright father shaped her writing, according to her son Patrick Smyth.
'His writing was undoubtedly the source, the impulse, for her to write, in no small measure an attempt to prove herself to him, although his sudden departure as a father and his aloofness hurt,' he wrote in his Irish Times essay.
In Dublin, Ms. Johnston attended Trinity College, where she studied English and French before leaving school in 1951 without graduating. She then married Ian Smyth, who had been a fellow student. Trinity later awarded her an honorary degree.
In 2009, Ms. Johnston was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2012 she was given a lifetime achievement honor by the Irish Book Awards.
In addition to Patrick, Ms. Johnston is survived by another son, Malachi; two daughters, Sarah and Lucy; two grandchildren; and her brother, Michael. Her marriage to Mr. Smyth ended in divorce. Her second husband, David Gilliland, died in 2019.