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New Statesman
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Jane Gardam's dispatches from the past
Phoot by GL Portrait / Alamy Stock Photo In Showing the Flag, Jane Gardam's 1989 volume of short stories, the final story, 'After the Strawberry Tea', describes the troubled house move of James and Elisabeth, a couple in their mid-60s who are leaving their family home in Wimbledon for a new life in east Kent. As they load their indignant cat into the car, they have an unsettling encounter with an elderly neighbour, who warns of nuclear catastrophe on the Kent coast. Turning from the motorway into the Kentish landscape of fields and orchards, Elisabeth is overcome with thoughts of impending doom. Not long ago I followed James and Elisabeth's route down the old pilgrim's road from London to Kent. My former home was in south-east rather than prosperous south-west London, but I had lived there for 30 years, raised my child there, and although no dotty old neighbour turned up to warn of nuclear meltdown at Dungeness, I set off for my new house with an equivalent sense of foreboding. The following night, amid a chaos of unpacking, I opened a box at random and found three volumes of Gardam's great last trilogy: Old Filth (published in 2004 when she was 78), The Man in the Wooden Hat (2011) and Last Friends (2013). It was a strangely appropriate discovery: uprootings, changes of landscape and the quest for a home, for love and belonging haunt these novels, set amid the twilight of Empire and punctuated by memorial services. Jane Gardam's own death, at the age of 96, was announced on 29 April. For her admirers, her obituaries made strange reading. They dutifully reviewed her childhood in the seaside town of Redcar in Yorkshire in the 1930s, her post-war studies at London University, her marriage to a barrister, David Gardam, and her writing life, whose early promise was delayed by raising their three children. While her many literary awards were noted, the consensus was that 'she never achieved the literary acclaim of contemporaries such as Margaret Drabble or Penelope Lively' – novelists with whom Gardam had little in common, beyond a vague generalisation that they were all old ladies. But Gardam was, among her remarkable qualities, a great storyteller, whose narratives of apparently remote figures of a postwar era as emotionally distant as the Bronze Age are as plangently resonant as the human dilemmas of love and loss depicted by Chekhov or Tolstoy (when she appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2017, Gardam said she would take War and Peace as her book of choice). Old Filth and its two sequels are often considered Gardam's greatest works. We first encounter the octogenarian Sir Edward Feathers, the 'Old Filth' of the title, as an absence. His inappropriate nickname – he is a fastidiously groomed and distinguished old lawyer – is a hoary legal acronym for ex-pats: 'Failed In London? Try Hong Kong'. Sir Edward had dropped in for lunch at the Inner Temple, but now his chair is empty and the remaining Judges and Benchers are gossiping about its recently-departed occupant. Great advocate, they say. Had a soft life. Made a packet at the Far Eastern Bar. Good to see the old coelacanth… Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe As is usually the case with gossip, some of this is true, and some spectacularly not. Filth's practice in Hong Kong has made him rich, and for decades the former British colony was where he and his wife, Betty, felt a sense of belonging, intensified by the fact that both were born in the far East. But as the end of British rule in Hong Kong approaches, Betty understands that their old age must be spent at 'home' – that term inexorably applied by British expatriates to the place where they believed their values, and their children, were best formed. And so Filth and Betty move to a prosperous village on the Dorset/Wiltshire borders where, Gardam writes, 'They put their hearts into becoming content, safe in their successful lives.' That simple sentence is fraught with jeopardy. If their lives are successful and safe, why must they put their hearts into being content? Filth's safety rests, it seems, on firm foundations: his brilliant legal career and his long marriage to sensible, sturdy Betty. But after her sudden death – planting tulips in the garden, he is unmoored. When a rapprochement with a once-loathed adversary at the Hong Kong bar ends with his death, Filth's careful detachment fragments into a chaotic quest to understand the horrors of his past. The epigraph of Gardam's novel is a quotation from Charles Lamb: 'Lawyers, I suppose, were children once'. An admirer of Charles Dickens, Gardam noted that Dickens wrote on the manuscript of The Old Curiosity Shop, 'Keep the child in view'. It is advice that she takes in Old Filth, whose structure tracks the convergence of appalling childhood experience with desolate late old age, culminating in a moment of transcendent redemption. 'All my life… from my early childhood,' Filth says, 'I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death, from everyone I loved or who cared for me. I want to know why.' Gardam's novel employs many of the devices of the 19th-century novel: the damaged, resilient orphan child; shattering revelations overheard, or revealed in devastating letters; benefactors in unexpected guise; the magic of coincidence and the redeeming (but dangerously frangible) qualities of friendship. Money is an urgent preoccupation, and Gardam vividly depicts the lack of agency that comes with slender means. But her technique is anything but Victorian. In Old Filth, the deforming experiences of childhood are mirrored and intercut with those of old age in vivid, filmic fashion. 'I suppose you know,' says one character, 'that there are those who believe that endurance of cruelty as a child can feed genius.' 'I have no genius,' Filth replies, bleakly. As the memorial services of major characters accumulate, the minor characters ('There are no minor characters,' said Gardam) take centre stage in a trilogy whose theme is, as Gardam put it, 'The way that what happened to the child… shapes the adult forever.' 'Nobody in the swim is ever really interesting,' Gardam once remarked. But even now, when a social media presence is a prerequisite for many authors, mere name recognition is little gauge of literary worth. The value of Gardam's writing rests in less perishable qualities: her fine observation and psychological acuity, her remarkable gift for storytelling and her unforgettable depiction in these three late, great works, off how fate, chance and the tectonic shifts of world politics bruise and sustain the human heart. Related
The Guardian
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A natural storyteller': Jane Gardam remembered by Tessa Hadley
Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, was such an exuberant, inventive writer. It's the sheer energy of the voice you notice first, picking up one of her books from the shelf; she had the easy authority of a natural storyteller. Her first book, A Long Way from Verona, was written for children and published in 1971, when she was in her early 40s. 'I ought to tell you at the beginning,' announces Jessica Vye in the first sentence, 'that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine.' In the book, clever bookish girls, at a private school in wartime, are hungry for adventures and also for tea with cress sandwiches and chocolate eclairs; they belong to that class beloved of British fiction in the old days, educated people fallen on hard times. Jessica's father has left his job as a schoolmaster to follow his vocation as a poor curate. The Summer After the Funeral, published in 1973, begins with the death of Athene Price's elderly vicar father, when his young wife and children have to move out of the vicarage with no money. Athene believes she's a reincarnation of Emily Brontë; Jessica has mentioned Henry James, Chopin and Shakespeare by the end of her second chapter. These books belong to the tail-end of that rich period of English middle-class children's writing, which depended upon an audience of sophisticated and informed young readers; it was partly through the books that their readers grew sophisticated and informed. These books are set in the north of England; Gardam grew up mostly in North Yorkshire. The difference between the rugged north and the posh home counties, which are the other half of her subject, cuts across her fiction. In her adult novel Faith Fox she describes two tribes, 'South and north, above and below the line from the Wash to the Severn, the language-line that is still not quite broken to this day.' Gardam was born Jean Mary Pearson in 1928 in Coatham, Redcar, where her father was a schoolteacher. She won a scholarship to Bedford College in London to study English, where the 'work was dreary, heavy with Anglo Saxon' and she was bored 'except for when I was in the wonderful but ice-cold Bedford College library (no coal or heating in the 40s).' She married David Hill Gardam, who became a distinguished KC and expert in construction law; they had three children. When she met Stevie Smith at a party, she told her she was 'a Wimbledon housewife who writes novels'. Smith persisted: 'But who are you really?' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion In Faith Fox Gardam writes that a mask was 'slapped on' by 'the fearless, comic, incorruptible battle-axe Englishwoman … out of consideration, out of a wish not to increase concern and also out of a genetic belief that our deepest feelings are diminished when we show them'. Maybe it's partly that inheritance which explains why many of Gardam's adult novels carry something over tonally from her beginnings in children's fiction. The opening of Crusoe's Daughter, published in 1985, promises all the enchantments of childhood reading. 'I am Polly Flint. I came to live at the yellow house when I was six years old. I stood on the steps in the wind, and the swirls of sand, and my father pulled the brass bell-knob beside the huge front door.' Although the novel goes on to narrate the whole of Polly's life, including her alcoholism and thwarted love affairs, it can't quite get out from under that brisk, intelligent over-voice, helpless not to be reassuring, however dark the material. It's in her final trilogy (Old Filth, 2004, The Man in the Wooden Hat, 2009, and Last Friends, 2013) that she achieved the perfect balance between manner and matter. Each novel tells the story of the same three lives, but from a different perspective: 'old coelacanth' retired judge Edward Feathers (Failed in London Try Hong Kong), Feathers' wife Betty, and his career rival, Veneering, who was once – just once – Betty's lover. The books gather up these lives retrospectively, from the vantage point of old age and death; their collage of fragments, contradictions and memories compose a portrait of a vanished world of manners, politics, class, sex, empire. Gardam's knowing ironies come into their own, and all the jeopardy and pain, which can feel tamed or missing in earlier books, crowds into the cracks between the fragments, around the edges of the masks. Yet the trilogy isn't gloomy: it's funny, ruthless, clever and somehow uplifting, without a trace of sentimentality. The whole is a triumphant achievement.
Boston Globe
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Jane Gardam, witty novelist of a waning British Empire, dies at 96
'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. It won Britain's Whitbread novel prize (now known as the Costa award). Advertisement 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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.' Advertisement 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) 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. Filth is an acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong. 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. Advertisement Ms. Gardam's 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,' 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 to Kathleen Mary and William Pearson, both teachers. 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 doctorate 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. David Gardam's work, like Filth's legal career, often led him to Asia. He died in 2010. In addition to her son Tom, Jane Gardam leaves 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. Advertisement '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 family's maid. Her 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.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Unsentimental, Acerbic and Deeply Compassionate Fiction of Jane Gardam
The work of the British novelist Jane Gardam, who died on April 28 at 96, was frequently described as 'strange' because, despite her long and prolific career, she eluded easy categorization. And people are, as she well knew, essentially lazy. Lazy is one thing Gardam was assuredly not. She did not begin writing until she was in her 30s — she claimed to have started the morning she dropped off her youngest child at his first day of school — but went on to publish 22 novels, some for adults and others for children and young people (although she regarded the distinction as arbitrary), 10 story collections and one nonfiction book, to say nothing of reams of criticism and essays. When she came to many Americans' attention with the publication of the 'Old Filth' trilogy, she was in her 70s. But in her native Britain, she had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978 (for 'God on the Rocks,' a subtle story of family tensions between the wars, which lost to the more pyrotechnic Iris Murdoch classic 'The Sea, the Sea') and won a slew of other awards, including the Whitbread twice (for 'The Hollow Land' and 'The Queen of the Tambourine'). It would not be too strong to say she was regarded as something of a national treasure, although she would most likely have raised an eyebrow at both the coziness and the cliché. About Gardam's vast body of work one can make few generalizations, save that whatever one's taste, it would be nearly impossible not to connect to something. Readers who loved 'Old Filth' (which stands for 'Failed in London, Try Hong Kong' and was based in part on her husband's legal career) might have been either delighted or puzzled by its two sequels: 'The Man in the Wooden Hat,' which is devoted to a deliberately unsympathetic protagonist; and the spare, unsentimental 'Last Friends,' about the only people left standing after the first two volumes. 'Faith Fox' is set in a version of the 1990s and tinged with religion. 'Crusoe's Daughter' concludes with a few mysterious pages of stage dialogue; 'The Flight of the Maidens' is a straightforward historical. She paid no attention to literary fashion, but to call her a holdover from another era, or nostalgic, would be reductive, too. Gardam was not an English novelist, a women's novelist, an experimental novelist or a traditionalist — although at times she was all of these. Born Jean Mary Pearson in 1928 in North Yorkshire to a respectable but not rich family (like the protagonist of 'Bilgewater,' she was the daughter of a headmaster), Gardam spent her childhood writing and reading. She was often alone; 'Robinson Crusoe' was one of her favorite texts. After reading English on scholarship, she went to work for a London magazine, and while she dabbled in the literary scene, had neither the time nor the budget for bohemian excesses. After marrying the barrister David Gardam, she moved to Kent, where she raised three children. 'A Long Way From Verona,' a succinct autobiographical novel about a 13-year-old girl's coming-of-age, was published in 1971. Fierce sympathy for the child's point of view, and the frustrations and passions of youth, were some of her few constants, and arguably the main thrust of the 'Old Filth' trilogy. Although she dealt with sadnesses and loss, the lack of drama in her personal life, and the combination of openness and reserve she showed in interviews, may be part of the secret to her relative privacy and her attendant productivity. Her iconoclasm was quiet; her modesty was real. I met Gardam on what turned out to be a difficult day five years ago. I had been sent by The Paris Review to conduct a long-form interview with her, but upon landing at Heathrow Airport, I turned on my phone and found the screen covered in missed calls and urgent text messages. By the time I arrived at her yellow stone house in the postcard-pretty village of Sandwich, I had received some very sad personal news. After a few minutes absorbing the shock and grief, I decided to stay and complete the assignment. Gardam was 90; I might never have the chance to talk to her again. I half-settled into a local inn, which had been modernized just enough to rob it of charm, and not quite enough to provide comfort. I splashed my face with cold water. Someone had left a basket of windfall apples next to a back door, with a sign offering them to passers-by. There was a town crier in full regalia sitting in the pub; the weather was perfect. Gardam's house — parts of which dated back to the Middle Ages — was filled with character and looked out on a well-tended back garden bordered by gnarled fruit trees. The horsehair wig that belonged to Mr. Gardam, who died in 2010, sat on a table near the front door. Gardam herself was wonderfully gracious, as was her assistant, who offered me sherry. We sat down by firelight in chintz-covered wing chairs, and I answered questions about my journey. I turned on my recording devices and took out my notebook and pen. I asked an opening question — Was she read to as a child? — and promptly started sobbing. She let me cry; she listened to my apologies and then my explanation; she said, 'I'm sorry, but I must give you a hug.' And then we talked steadily: about life, and loss, and the escape of writing, and ghosts and Gardam's quiet spirituality. It was a strange interview, appropriately. And all I can say is that anyone who is in extremis should have the luck — and more than that — to be met with such intelligent, unfussy sympathy. I can't tell people which book of Gardam's they should read, however much I truly love the humanity of 'Crusoe's Daughter' (which is about a young woman who is, yes, emotionally marooned) or 'Last Friends' (which proves that there really is no such thing as a minor character). It is too tied up for me; my judgment is compromised. What I will say is this: The late commercial success of the 'Old Filth' trilogy — a gently acerbic meditation on the varieties of human frailty and the painful joy of living — is very Gardam-like. We can always surprise with kindness, itself so strange and unexpected.
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jane Gardam obituary
The prolific novelist, short-story writer and children's author Jane Gardam, who has died aged 96, had a taste for the absurd and an extraordinary facility for characterisation and social comedy. Accused once of being a 'muslin and tea party writer', she shot back: 'I'm more hair-cloth and gin.' It was a remark that deftly summarised two features of her work: religion and the more subversive side of middle-class life. Gardam's commitment to literary experimentation was evident from early on. She hated the idea of writing as a genteel occupation, and set out to challenge both herself and her readers. She did this partly in terms of form: Crusoe's Daughter (1985) ends with a playlet; The Queen of the Tambourine (1991) is epistolary; the denouement of Faith Fox (1996) features the prayers muttered in church by various characters. Her much praised short-story collection Missing the Midnight (1997) explores the many permutations of the ghost story. Changing perspective was another of her interests: The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) is a sympathetic retelling of the earlier Old Filth (2004) from the point of view of Betty, a judge's frustrated wife, while the final work in the series, Last Friends (2013) , picks up the story of Filth's rival in law, Terry Veneering. These experiments were not always convincing, and there is a sense, even in some of Gardam's most enjoyable works, that too much is going on. Thus the exhilarating God on the Rocks (1978), which was nominated for the Booker prize, features a Christian sect, a psychiatric facility, a tyrannical mother, a thwarted love affair, a husband falling into sin and a wife joyously rushing towards it. The equally vibrant Faith Fox includes various abandoned children, a charismatic vicar, a grieving mother, a disillusioned wife, some disregarded grandparents, a former lover with Alzheimer's disease and a troupe of Tibetans. The tangle of stories in The Flight of the Maidens (2000) risks distracting the reader from Gardam's sensitive recounting of the case of Lieselotte, a Kindertransport refugee. But if her narrative can be overcrowded, Gardam met the other challenge of her writing – to recreate the melodrama and passion of domestic and suburban life – with finesse. 'There's no point in writing anything if it doesn't disturb you in some way,' she said. 'A novel must be about what everyone is thinking, but nobody dares say.' One of her most unsettling books, The Queen of the Tambourine, took its inspiration from life. Gardam had seen a perfectly dressed and made-up woman running down Wimbledon High Street screaming. No one stopped to help her. 'I wanted to show how a suburban street has tentacles that go out into the world and how a woman who seems to be civilised is as totally alone in a savage environment as someone in the jungle,' she explained. Her portrait of the mental disintegration of a fervent do-gooder, Eliza Peabody, won her the Whitbread best novel award. Born Jean Pearson in Coatham, North Yorkshire, Gardam grew up in the North Riding and in Cumbria, where she spent summers on her grandfather's farm. It was a background of which she was proud and which informs much of her work. Yorkshire and its coast are the setting for many of her novels and she uses its dialect in the Whitbread children's book award-winning The Hollow Land (1981), for the blowsy maid Lydia in God on the Rocks, and for the Smikes, the good-hearted but terrifying ex-burglars of Faith Fox. In fact, she attributed her career to her forebears, explaining: 'Cumbrians can't tell anything without making a story out of it. I suppose that's where I learned most.' Her parents were another influence. Her father, William Pearson, a mathematician turned headmaster, was bitterly disappointed by what he saw as her lack of academic prowess, and Gardam's response is reflected in the alienated, underappreciated young women of her early fiction. Her mother, Kathleen (nee Helm), was a more positive force. Gardam said that she learned her love of language, and her strong sense of religion, from her mother. Crusoe's Daughter is her most politically astute novel and she described this, her own favourite, as partly about her mother. The sense of frustration at women's lot is clear in her heroine Polly Flint's letter to her aunt: 'Because I am a girl … I was to be stood in a vacuum … left in the bell-jar … Nothing in the world is ever to happen to me.' Jane was educated at Saltburn high school for girls and Bedford College, London (now part of Royal Holloway London), where she read English and caught up on the artistic delights of the capital (she had only visited the theatre once before, and often went hungry as a student to finance her craving for drama). She hoped to become a literary scholar, and began a doctorate on the 18th-century essayist and literary figure Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lack of funds, and perhaps temperament, led her to stop after a year. 'I longed to be an academic,' she said, 'but that time working in the British Museum was the closest I've ever come to going mad myself.' Her first job was as a travelling librarian for the Red Cross, visiting military, naval and mental hospital libraries. She moved into journalism, working first as a sub-editor on Weldon's Ladies' Journal and then as assistant literary editor of Time and Tide, where she met TS Eliot and John Betjeman. Her marriage to the high-ranking lawyer David Gardam in 1954, and the birth of their first child, Tim, in 1956, meant the end of that career. The next 15 years of Gardam's life were taken up with child-rearing. She had started to write as a child, but stopped when she became a mother. 'I just couldn't separate myself completely … There didn't seem much choice,' she said. 'I did have quite exhausting children and their father was working abroad in the far east a lot.' After her second child, Kitty, started school, she wrote a novel in Wimbledon library. It was rejected by Oxford University Press as 'improper' (the protagonist was a gay curate) but her next project, begun the day her youngest child, Tom, first went to school, was successful. A Long Way from Verona, a novel for teenagers, was published in 1971. After this, Gardam became unstoppable. A book of linked short stories for older children, A Few Fair Days, appeared in the same year, and a vivid work for teenagers, The Summer After the Funeral, two years later. In 1975 her first work for adults was published: the short-story collection Black Faces, White Faces, inspired by a trip to Jamaica where her husband was working on a case. The age distinction is questionable for Gardam, however. Long before the teenage/adult crossover fiction of Philip Pullman and Mark Haddon, The Summer After the Funeral's struggling adolescent heroine Athene, feeling her way through vastly strange adult worlds of depressed aunts, lesbian couples and lascivious artists, was straining at the boundaries of teenage fiction. The Summer After the Funeral and the later Bilgewater (1977) are now published as works for adults. Comedy and sympathy are the marks of Gardam's talent. God on the Rocks offers a tender portrait of the struggle of a mother, Elinor, to maintain her close relationship with her eight-year-old daughter, Margaret, following the birth of her new baby, alongside the comic delights of Margaret's misunderstandings of the adult world and the billowing figure of no-better-than-she-should-be Lydia. Faith Fox recounts the bereaved Thomasina's almost violent love for her dead daughter, Holly, amidst the wild social satire of the clash between north and south. The much-celebrated Old Filth trilogy offers a compassionate exploration of the ravages of old age, and its myriad embarrassments. It is for this emotional and social understanding, as well as her ear for comic dialogue, that this joyous and challenging writer will be remembered. Muslin and tea never had much of a place in her work. Gardam was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and OBE in 2009. David died in 2010, and their daughter, Kitty, also predeceased her. She is survived by Tim, Tom, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Jane Mary Gardam, writer, born 11 July 1928; died 28 April 2025
