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New York Times
13-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Jennifer Johnston, 95, Novelist Who Probed Ireland's Fault Lines, Dies
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.
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jennifer Johnston obituary
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
