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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.
Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Jane Gardam obituary: novelist who won the Whitbread award twice
Jane Gardam once said, 'The best sound in the world is a child laughing out loud at a book.' It was a sound she much elicited as an award-winning author whose deliciously arch stories were compared to Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield, was never out of print, and bestrode a hinterland between children's fiction and the adults who never grew out of her. Indeed, many of her present-day grown-up readers began with her books for children like The Hollow Land (1981) for which she won the Whitbread Literary Award, or her Kit stories (1983, 1986 and 1998). The first paragraph of the latter might just as easily have been the start of one of her short stories for adults: 'The Kit was not a kitten.
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
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Jane Gardam, author of Old Filth and The Hollow Land, dies aged 96
Jane Gardam, author of books for adults and children including Old Filth and The Hollow Land, has died at the age of 96, her publisher has confirmed. The Yorkshire-born novelist's career spanned 50 years, and she was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2009. Her books were also nominated for the Booker prize, the Orange (now Women's) prize and the Folio (now Writers') prize. She remains the only person to have won the Whitbread prize (latterly the Costa) in two categories: she won the children's book category in 1981 for The Hollow Land and the best novel category in 1991 for The Queen of the Tambourine. Old Filth was named as one of the BBC's 100 greatest British novels in 2015. Gardam was much admired by fellow authors, with Ian McEwan calling her 'a treasure of English contemporary writing'. Describing Old Filth when it came out in 2004, fellow novelist Maggie Gee said Gardam's writing 'crackles with energy, variety, sensuous richness. It is the writing of a 25-year-old with the wisdom and subtlety of a razor-sharp 100-year-old.' Born in 1928, Gardam was raised in the seaside Yorkshire town of Redcar by a maths teacher father and a stay-at-home mother who was passionate about writing. 'She wrote all the time, endlessly. She'd just say to any child in the street, excuse me, could you just take this letter to the post. And she was always writing sermons,' Gardam told the Guardian in a 2005 interview. Her 1985 novel Crusoe's Daughter, about an isolated woman who is obsessed with books, specifically Robinson Crusoe, was partly inspired by Gardam's mother, she said. It 'has a lot to do with a girl not being educated, when if she had been a boy the money would have been found'. 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 After the second world war, Gardam moved to London for the education her mother never had, attending Bedford College (part of London University). After completing her degree in English, she had a number of book-related jobs, including a stint as a Red Cross travelling librarian, and then a career as a journalist, first as a subeditor on the Weldon's Ladies' Journal and then as assistant literary editor at Time and Tide. She married a barrister, David Gardam, whose career partially inspired her most famous novel, Old Filth, a tragicomedy about a retired judge grieving his wife. The couple had three children, and it was only when the youngest had started school that she began her first book. 'I think I would have died if it hadn't been published,' she said in a 2011 Guardian interview. 'I was desperate to get started – I was possessed.' Gardam and her husband moved to Sandwich in 1987, where she remained after his death in 2010, before moving to Oxford in her final years. Her last book was Last Friends, published in 2013 and shortlisted for the 2014 Folio prize. The finale to a trilogy that began with Old Filth and continued with The Man in the Wooden Hat, Last Friends was described as 'exuberant and funny and dizzy and a little bit frightening' by Guardian reviewer Tessa Hadley. Gardam was one of the first novelists published by Abacus, an imprint of Little, Brown. A spokesperson from the publisher said the novelist was 'hugely loved by us all. Her warmth, humour and wisdom are quite irreplaceable.' 'I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed,' Gardam told the Telegraph in 2013. 'I don't think my style has changed very much at all – though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.'
