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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
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
New York Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Jane Gardam, Witty Novelist of a Waning British Empire, Dies at 96
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.'
