09-03-2025
Catherine Peters, author who wrote acclaimed biographies of Dickens, Byron and Wilkie Collins
Catherine Peters, who has died aged 94, had a lauded academic career that only began when she was 50; The King of Inventors (2016), is the standard life of Wilkie Collins, and she also wrote much-praised books on Thackeray (1987), Byron (2000) and Charles Dickens (2009).
She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1992, and that year was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Biography Prize, as well as being runner-up for the Southern Arts Literature Award. All this was accomplished despite a sometimes miserable and traumatic childhood and unhappy first marriage.
Catherine Lisette Peters was born in London on September 30 1930, one of two children of AD Peters, the literary agent whose formidable list included JB Priestley, CS Lewis and Evelyn Waugh. He had been born to Danish parents in Schleswig-Holstein as August Detlef Peters, which was changed to Augustus Dudley when he was adopted, aged three, by an aunt in London. Catherine's mother was Helen MacGregor.
The marriage ended in divorce, and Catherine and her brother stayed with their mother. In 1932 Helen married a client of AD Peters, Anthony Berkeley Cox – author, under a clutch of noms de plume, of popular novels, chiefly crime fiction, including his best-known, Malice Aforethought. This marriage ended in the late 1940s.
Catherine was two when her mother married her stepfather, and was in her teens when the marriage broke up. Cox sexually abused her (as she later told her eldest son, the writer Matthew Barton). Adding to this wretchedness, she lost her elder brother, Richard, who was killed in 1945 in Burma behind Japanese lines.
In January 1952, aged only 21, with the blonde good looks of a film starlet, Catherine married the saturnine, handsome John Glyn Barton, a solicitor, who would be prospective Liberal candidate for South Paddington in 1963 – and serial womaniser. They had four children, Matthew (poet and writer), Robert (biological anthropologist), Will (the actor, Will Barton), and Thomas, who died aged nine in a drowning accident.
Their mother, effectively a single parent, had taken them in 1966 on holiday to the west of Ireland, 'cramming us all into her tiny Mini car with luggage strapped precariously to the roof-rack, driving all the way from London to the ferry in Wales,' wrote Robert.
It was there that Thomas drowned. The reprobate husband turned up but took only two of the boys with him, leaving Catherine to deal with practical matters, the shock and the grief. 'He was a rogue,' said Will, 'and left us to pursue chaos. Women were his Achilles heel.' They divorced in 1965.
Catherine bore all this stoically – the one bright spot being Fleet House in the Vale of Health, Hampstead, a Victorian villa where they moved in the mid-1950s. It was located in the middle of the Heath, so it was more like being in idyllic countryside than in London.
There were lots of parties and long family walks: 'We children ran feral on the Heath making dens and climbing trees,' recalled Robert, and in summer Catherine was a regular at the ladies' swimming pond; their neighbours included the pianist Alfred Brendel.
While bringing up her three sons, Catherine worked for her father's agency, and as a publishers' reader for Jonathan Cape from the late 1960s to about 1973.
In October 1970 Catherine married Anthony Storr, the writer and Jungian psychoanalyst who had a passion for music, which Catherine shared. His marriage history was a source of confusion, as the first wife, whom he divorced the same year, was also called Catherine Storr, and also a client of AD Peters.
The first Catherine Storr was the bestselling author of children's books such as Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf (1955). This is why Catherine Storr the literary scholar always published as Catherine Peters. (Following their divorce in 1970 Catherine, the first wife, married the economist Lord Balogh and styled herself Lady Balogh.)
Anthony Storr gave up his private psychiatric practice in 1974 and they moved to Oxford, where he was consultant psychotherapist for the Oxford Area Health Authority, a lecturer in psychiatry and member of the Senior Common Room of Wadham College; he later joined Green College. He published a dozen or more books and made frequent appearances on radio and television.
At this point, in 1977, with the children now grown, Catherine went as a mature student to read English language and literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and graduated in 1980 with the best First of her year. She then taught English literature at Somerville from the late 1980s to the early 1990s.
After her retirement, in her mid-sixties she taught evening classes at Oxford's Department of Continuing Education. In a 1996 interview in The Independent she said that her pupils tended to stay the course.
'What happens is usually we get a great crowd at the first meeting. Those who don't think it's going to live up to their expectations drift away, but there is a hard core which stays and completes the two terms, which is 20 evenings. Not only that, they come back year after year. There are a lot of retired people who say it is the only thing that keeps them going. They say it ought to be on the National Health.'
Catherine Storr also wrote poetry all her life, some of which was published in small collections, and was a regular reviewer for several papers and magazines.
She and Anthony entertained a good deal at their house in Oxford. She was a good and imaginative cook, the wine was poured generously, and the guests were drawn from the most interesting company Oxford had to offer, along with many from the London media and the music world.
After Anthony's death in 2001, Catherine moved to a modern flat, where her next-door neighbour was an old chum, Desmond Morris. Her three sons gave her much pleasure.
In her last years, suffering from mild dementia, she moved to a care home, which appeared to give her a new enjoyment of life. Life dealt her some rotten hands along with some tremendous gifts; she played them without complaining, and made the most of her talents.
Catherine Peters, born September 30 1930, died January 12 2025
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