Jennifer Johnston obituary

The Guardian

06-03-2025

In an interview published in 1999, Jennifer Johnston, who has died aged 95, defined the way she went about creating her luminous works of fiction. 'I'm not an innovative sort of writer,' she said. 'I'm always working with fairly strict, rather old-fashioned terms of what the novel means to me. And I'm working on a very, very small canvas.'
This is perhaps an over-modest appraisal of her modus operandi. In fact, she never balked at tackling large subjects, or at bringing a new and invigorating sensibility to bear on old themes. Dubbed an Irish 'big house' novelist when she first appeared on the literary scene, Johnston soon made it clear that whatever she may have owed to her predecessors such as Maria Edgeworth or Elizabeth Bowen, she possessed a sure and delicate touch that was all her own.
She started out with The Captains and the Kings, published in 1972 when she was 42, and it won the Authors' Club first novel award. This was followed by The Gates (1973) and How Many Miles to Babylon? (1974). Shadows on Our Skin (1977), a coming-of-age story set in Derry during the Troubles, was included on the Booker prize shortlist, while The Old Jest (1979), about the Irish war of independence, secured its author the Whitbread prize (and was filmed as The Dawning in 1988).
In 1976 Johnston had married her second husband, David Gilliland, a Northern Irish solicitor and dendrologist. His home, the lovely 18th-century Brook Hall on the outskirts of Derry, became her home for the next 40-odd years, and the setting from which her distinctive, needle-sharp and elliptical novels continued to appear.
Living where she did, in the bitter and dangerous 1970s, inspired Johnston to take on the knotty subjects of republican activism, degrees of commitment and unexalted life in the Bogside.
As critical of her own work as she sometimes was about the work of others, Johnston later dismissed Shadows on Our Skin as an utterly 'unimportant' book. The Railway Station Man (1984), however, was another matter, in her view and the view of most critics, with its stringent and compassionate response to acts of terrorism.
For all its subtlety and understatement, a thread of violence runs through the whole of Johnston's work. It acts as a kind of counterpart to a recurring narrative motif, the unexpected friendship between people from different generations, different social classes or different political affiliations; and it takes in the slaughter of the first world war's killing fields, along with political violence in Northern Ireland, and the violence inflicted by men on women and children, not excluding rape and incest.
Johnston's highly individual and inspiriting approach, in this and in other areas, was acknowledged in the continuing awards and honours she garnered, including a lifetime achievement award at the Irish Book awards in 2012. And the admiration of her peers never diminished. For Roddy Doyle, for example, she was simply 'the best Irish novelist'. 'She writes perfect novels,' he said.
She was born in Dublin into a Protestant upper-middle-class family with slightly bohemian tendencies – for Johnston, avoiding the big house altogether as a literary trope was not an option, given the circumstances of her upbringing and early life. Her father was the playwright and war correspondent Denis Johnston, and her mother was the actor and Abbey theatre director Shelah Richards. Jennifer was their first child and only daughter (a son, Michael, was born five years later).
Like many of her class, she grew up professing more affection for nannies and housekeepers than for either of her parents. In later years she described her mother as 'very, very strong, dominating and powerful', and though the implication is that these were positive qualities in her eyes, they can hardly have made for a peaceful childhood.
But the young Jennifer had many resources, including a close bond with her paternal grandparents (who lived in a version of the traditional big house) and – above all – she had the joy of growing up in a house filled with books. Though she suffered from weak eyesight even as a child, she learned to read at the age of four, and never stopped for the rest of her life.
Her parents' marriage was fraught with difficulties, and ended in divorce when their daughter was just seven. Denis then started a new family with his second wife, Betty Chancellor, also an actor, and as a consequence, Johnston said, she scarcely knew him.
Many years later, when she wrote a novel called Truth or Fiction (2009), about an elderly, disgruntled and long-neglected playwright hoping that someone is about to 'rediscover' him, many readers took it to be a direct portrayal of the author's father – an assumption she neither confirmed or denied. In fact, in this novel she is, as ever, exploring the endless complexities, the lies and secrets and the saving grace inherent in all kinds of family relations.
After an education at Park Hill school in Dublin that allowed her to idle her time away (according to her own testimony), Johnston went on to Trinity College Dublin to study English and French. But she never finished her degree, leaving instead in 1951 to marry a fellow student, Ian Smyth (the marriage later ended in divorce). He had qualified as a solicitor, and the couple lived first in Paris, and then in London, where their four children were born.
The 1960s came, and even in the midst of family life, Johnston was assiduously planning a literary future for herself. Her son Patrick remembers his mother seated at her desk and writing away, in an effort to escape 'the trap of domesticity and the isolation'. It proved an entirely fruitful effort.
She continued to publish novels, and several plays, over more than four decades. Her later novels include Two Moons (1998), The Gingerbread Woman (2000), Grace and Truth (2005), Foolish Mortals (2007), A Sixpenny Song (2013) and Naming the Stars (2015). She was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009.
Following David's death in 2019, Johnston went to live in a nursing home in Dun Laoghaire, near Dublin. She had already begun to suffer from dementia, but her forthright demeanour and her sense of fun remained unaffected, as did her ability to charm and enthrall those around her. As for her own view of the world and its ways, she said: 'It's one bloody awful muddle from the moment you're born until the moment you die. You might as well just try and muddle through.'
She is survived by her children, Patrick, Sarah, Lucy and Malachi, two grandchildren, her brother, Micheal, and a half-brother, Rory.
Jennifer Johnston, novelist, born 12 January 1930; died 25 February 2025