The author and social historian Pat Barr, who has died aged 83, always maintained that the east was far more interesting than Europe, the US, or anywhere else in the west. The exotic cultures – so intriguing, so other – were undoubtedly the main but not the only reason for her view. Her many books (19 in all, including four bestseller novels written in the 1980s) bear eloquent witness to her lifelong fascination with the far east, and to her industry.
More specifically, she turned her attention to the letters and lives of 19th-century westerners: diverse groups such as missionaries, memsahibs, merchants, civil servants, travellers – all came under her observant eye. An elegant, spare writer, she noted their impressions of an alien culture and the impact their presence had on the local population.
After her marriage in 1956 to John Barr, an American teacher working on the University of Maryland’s Overseas Programme, she travelled with him, first to Bolivia for a year, then to Japan for three years. Bolivia, though unattractive to her as a country, did provide the inspiration for her first book, a detective novel, The Andean Murders (1960), written jointly with John under the pseudonym Laurence Hazard.
Japan she loved. She combined teaching at the Yokohama International School with researching and writing the thesis for a master’s degree at University College London. Her theme was the letters and lives of early western settlers arriving in the newly opened country after centuries of seclusion. This became two books, The Coming of the Barbarians (1967) and The Deer Cry Pavilion (1988), now reissued under the imprint of Faber Finds.
A Curious Life for a Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird (1970) was the book that pleased Pat the most. Ten years after its publication, she was delighted that Caryl Churchill, the playwright, impressed by the biography, chose Isabella to be one of her “guests” in her acclaimed 1982 play Top Girls.
Pat cheerfully acknowledged that she shared many characteristics with her heroine: widows both – Pat at the early age of 36 – and childless, or “childfree”, as Pat would always insist, they were indefatigable travellers despite occasional bouts of ill health. Short, squarish in appearance and trenchant in their opinions, they were also fiercely independent. To the end of her days Pat kept a miniature of Isabella on her mantelpiece.
Pat’s most enduring foreign love was India, a country she visited many times, finding it a rich resource for writing and new friends. Her novels enabled her to retire in unostentatious comfort to Norwich, her beloved birthplace. Although disappointed in later life to find herself relegated to the “mid-list”, she had many local interests and friends to keep her “happy and contented”, she said.
Her travels continued throughout her life: to Europe eventually, but more importantly to Coll, the Hebridean island where in 1967 she and John had bought Hyne, an abandoned croft by the seashore, which they lovingly restored, John making the furniture from driftwood. After John’s death, Pat continued to spend the summer months there, year after year, writing but also generously inviting friends and their children to stay.
Pat was an active feminist, finding much to engage (and enrage) her in the 1970s. She joined Women in Media, the influential campaigning group founded by many well known female broadcasters and journalists of the time, including Mary Stott, editor of the Guardian’s women’s page and Pat’s good friend. Pat’s book The Framing of the Female (1978), with delightful illustrations by Mel Calman, the cartoonist, was one outcome of this period; her contribution to Virago’s Is This Your Life? (1977) another.
She was an only child, born Patricia Miriam Copping in Norwich. Her father was a shoeshop salesman and her mother worked as a cleaner in the very road where Pat later bought her charming Victorian cottage. Pat won a scholarship to Norwich high school for girls, but had to leave at 16 to earn as a shorthand typist after her father was struck down by a disabling cerebral haemorrhage.
Undaunted, she studied for her A-levels at night school and then read English at Birmingham University, graduating in 1956, followed immediately by her marriage. After Japan, the Barrs settled in Britain, both to become writers. John, an environmental journalist and author of Derelict Britain, died of cancer in 1971. Pat never remarried.
• Pat Barr, writer, born 25 April 1934; died 20 March 2018
