Jane Gardam, Witty Novelist of a Waning British Empire, Dies at 96

New York Times

29-04-2025

Jane Gardam, a novelist whose works captured with wit and concision the last rays of the sun setting on the British Empire and the lifestyles that were extinguished with it, died on Monday in Chipping Norton, England. She was 96.
The death, at a care facility, was confirmed by her son Tom Gardam.
Distinct from one another as planets, Ms. Gardam's many novels are as thick with madness and self-sacrifice as Shakespeare and as fraught with longstanding misapprehensions as Molière. Her books are leavened by slapstick moments, farcical encounters and slippery characters who sometimes pop up where you least expect them — in other, unrelated books.
'The Queen of the Tambourine' (1991), an uproarious and surprising tale about a serious subject — a woman's descent into psychosis — contains almost all of the ingredients above, and won Britain's Whitbread novel prize (now known as the Costa award).
In it, the well-off, 50-ish Eliza Peabody writes increasingly intimate letters to a neighbor, Joan, as she insinuates herself into the perfect household she imagines across the street. This connection of sorts (she never gets a letter back) brings odd messengers, handsome strangers, gaudy earrings and other enrichments to her life.
In Ms. Gardam's rich, ambling prose, a sentence can end up far from where it started. In one letter to Joan, Eliza describes, for pages, a nighttime walk through the town, passing the lighted window of Marjorie Gargery and her husband drinking from mugs:
'The darkened windows on the floors above conceal each a sleeping Gargery child stuffed with knowledge. As I watch, the windows all burst open and the children fly out of them and away, five Chagallic embryos. One clutches its little blanket, another a suitcase labeled 'Anywhere,' one is baying at the moon. Take comfort in the cocoa, beloved Gargerys, while you can.'
And a few blocks later: 'I turn left. Down the line of little cottages I go, the servants' cottages of the big houses a hundred years back. A woman with a grim ponytail is playing a violin through double glazing so that there's no way of knowing if the music matches the passion of her widow's face. She's alone. I watch for a bit to see if she will explode into little bits — stars and comets that stick to the ceiling like wet confetti. She did this for me last week.'
Ms. Gardam's work captured both working-class and aristocratic Britain of a certain era, mostly between the world wars. 'I try to write about real Englishness, not export-Englishness,' she told the Elegant Variation blog in 2007, 'and I believe that I sometimes get near to it, and occasionally it is not what's expected.'
The impossible appears, cloaked by the conventional, in the books that ultimately endeared Ms. Gardam to Americans. She earned serious critical attention in the United States for 'Old Filth' (2006, named a Notable Book by The New York Times) and 'The Man in the Wooden Hat' (2009), intricate, interlocking works — the first two of a trilogy — that stand alone but also complete each other, as do their married protagonists, Filth and Betty.
Examining their relationship from either side of their largely unruffled marriage bed, Ms. Gardam shows us the tangled and lonely inner lives of two relics of British colonial Asia.
Edward Feathers — his nickname, Filth, is an acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong — lost his mother when he was a baby. His father, a colonial official in Malaya, showed little interest in the child and sent him 'home' to Britain at a tender age to attend school.
Edward landed in an abusive foster home where affection was in short supply but punishment, and dark cupboards with locks, were not.
Betty Feathers, a Scotswoman born Elisabeth Macintosh in China, suffered, too. During World War II, her family was sent to an internment camp in Shanghai, where she saw her parents die.
Filth, a barrister, proposes to Betty in writing. When they finally meet, in Hong Kong, he tells her: 'Elisabeth, you must never leave me. That's the condition. I've been left all my life. From being a baby I've been taken away from people. Raj orphan and so on. Not that I'm unusual there. And it's supposed to have given us all backbone.'
And so Betty pledges to be with him always, and that evening, 'just one hour too late,' finds herself with another man, one who electrifies her very soul. That man turns out to be Filth's legal adversary and personal nemesis, Terry Veneering. His story, including his relationship with Betty, is the subject of the third book in the trilogy, 'Last Friends' (2013).
Convoluted lives like these were a specialty of Ms. Gardam's. Her characters were sometimes precocious and often deeply damaged; on occasion, her books ventured into magical realism, and always there were secrets.
She was 'sometimes too subtle,' said Penelope Hoare, one of Ms. Gardam's editors.
'She hates explaining,' Ms. Hoare told The Guardian in 2005. 'She wants to keep the interpretation out of the books. She doesn't want to tell the readers what it means, as if that would take the bloom off.'
Filth, for example, has a guilty secret no reader would guess. It was only at her editor's suggestion that Ms. Gardam consented to adding a letter in a novel that revealed his buried transgression.
Jean Mary Pearson was born on July 11, 1928, in Coatham, in North Yorkshire, England, to Kathleen Mary and William Pearson, both schoolteachers. She came to despise her given name and changed it to Jane when she was 18. She earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1949 from Bedford College, University of London (now Royal Holloway), where she pursued a Ph.D. but did not complete it.
Although she said she had always known inside that she would write fiction, she postponed that pursuit after her marriage to David Hill Gardam, a lawyer, until their children went to school. Mr. Gardam's work, like Filth's legal career, often led him to Asia.
He died in 2010. In addition to her son Tom, Ms. Gardam is survived by another son, Tim, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. A daughter, Catharine Nicholson, died in 2011.
Although Ms. Gardam's books first appeared in Britain in the 1970s, most of them crossed the Atlantic slowly, some more than once.
'God on the Rocks' (1978), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, appeared in the United States shortly thereafter and was reissued in 2010. It's another view of a faded Britain between the wars, this one in a seaside town with bandstands, beach preachers and a full complement of eccentrics.
The protagonist is a curious little girl, Margaret, whose father leads the 'Primal Saints,' an evangelistic sect. Margaret, feeling a bit displaced (homicidal, even) over the birth of a brother, sets off exploring, visiting the asylum for mental patients (in their gowns, like a cluster of pale hydrangeas, as Ms. Gardam tells it) and spying on the fleshly pursuits of the maid.
Ms. Gardam's first books, in the early 1970s, were for young people; many were later reprinted and marketed for adults, including 'Bilgewater' (1976).
'The Hollow Land' won the 1981 Whitbread prize for children's novel, and 'The Stories,' a thick, juicy volume of short stories, came out in 2014.
Aside from fiction writing, Ms. Gardam worked as a journalist and a librarian but preferred 'the comfort of the alternative fictional worlds I inhabit,' she told Lucasta Miller of The Guardian.
Reality, she said, in a line that recalled her letter-writing character Eliza Peabody, 'has always seemed a bit of a fiction, to me anyway.'