The writer Joan Brady, who has died aged 84, was the first woman to win the Whitbread book of the year award, in 1993, for her novel Theory of War, but she probably would not have done so if she had heeded the advice of her husband, the novelist Dexter Masters, who edited an early draft of the book. “You see, I think he didn’t want people to think badly of me, so he cut all the modern sections, thinking they would embarrass me,” Brady said. After his death in 1989, she reinstated the sections that he had cut: “Without them the book wouldn’t have worked. Without them it loses its driving force.”
Theory of War earned not only awards, but comparisons with William Golding, Angela Carter and John Steinbeck. Brady’s afterword explained the story’s genesis: “My grandfather was a slave. This isn’t an uncommon claim for an American to make if the American is black. But I’m not black, I’m white. My grandfather was white, too. And he was sold into slavery not in some barbaric third world country; he was sold in the United States of America. A midwestern tobacco farmer bought him for $15 when he was four years old. Not many people know about such sales, though they were common just after the civil war.”
The novel was described as a modern work of genius in the Spectator, whose critic Warwick Collins hailed the book as a “novel, historical excavation, and philosophical treatise, ironic comedy and revenger’s tragedy. Its tone is both mordant and serious.” The real theme of the book was not so much slavery, Collins reckoned, but “America, or rather the difference between the manufactured image, the American dream, and another America that emerges – meretricious, ugly and somehow extraordinarily compelling – from these pages.”
Brady’s late rebellion against her husband’s editing is the more striking because she had long been besotted with him and deferred to his judgment. In her memoir, The Unmaking of a Dancer (1982, published in the UK in 1994 as Prologue: An Unconventional Life), Brady wrote that she fell in love with Dexter when she was only a child and he was in his 30s. “When I was three,” she told me in a 2008 Guardian interview, “there were three choices of lover for me. There was my cousin. There was Robert Oppenheimer [the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb, who was a great friend of Joan’s parents]. Or Dexter.”
Before she married Joan’s father, Joan’s mother had had an affair with Dexter and even contemplated spending her declining years with him. Joan recalled: “‘No, no, Joanie,’ my mother would say. ‘You can’t have him. He’s going to be the husband of my old age. It’s all arranged.’”
Instead, Joan, when 21, comforted Dexter after the death of his first wife, and her youthful charms proved seductive. Of her mother’s reaction, Brady said: “It was hard for her – after all, I was his junior by three decades. When I was 21 I was a slight little thing, and I looked 14. A mother would have been upset, setting aside her own feelings for him.”
Joan was born in San Francisco, the younger daughter of Mildred (nee Edie), a freelance journalist, and Robert Brady, an economist who taught at the University of California at Berkeley.
As a teenager, Joan did badly at the Anna Head school for girls, Berkeley, but well as a ballet dancer, first with the San Francisco Ballet and then, in 1960, with George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. Her memoir details diets of yoghurt and hard-boiled eggs, huge blood-filled blisters, and her admiration for Balanchine. At 21, she decided ballet was not the life for her. “My mind was turning to mush. So I enrolled at Columbia and took philosophy.”
In 1963 Joan and Dexter married and two years later left the US for Britain, eventually settling in Totnes, Devon, with their baby son, Alexander (who would grow up to become a writer and whose biography of a homeless man, Stuart: A Life Backwards, won the Guardian first book award in 2005). The couple’s plan was simple: “He [Dexter] was going to write and I was going to adore him.” And she did. “I thought of him as a great writer. But only after his death, I kind of realised he had had one book in him and he had written it before we came here.”
Instead, Joan emerged as the more celebrated writer, her literary career nonetheless catalysed by Dexter. One day she suggested an idea for a short story. Brady said her husband replied: “A sentence maybe. Maybe a paragraph. But a whole story? I’m afraid you’re going to have to write it yourself.” So she did. She wrote short stories published in Harper’s Bazaar, then in 1979 a debut novel, The Imposter, was published, followed by her memoir.
She continued to live and write in Totnes for many years. But there was a problem. Glue fumes from a shoe factory next door poisoned her, leading doctors to diagnose her with toxic peripheral neuropathy and nerve damage. The damage to her health and the inhibition of her writing as a result spurred Brady into an acrimonious legal battle with the factory and the local council.
She once more turned life into fiction, writing the thriller Bleedout (2008), set in the US, about a victim turned abuser who ends up jailed in South Hams state prison, named after the Devon council she had battled in court. What inspired her was “the idea that you see a poor woman on her own and so you can push her around. That’s maddening if you’re the victim. And I was.” In the year it was published, she was awarded £115,000 in an out-of-court settlement and, no less pleasingly, received admiring reviews for her career change into a thriller writer. “Move over John Grisham,” wrote the Mirror’s critic.
Another thriller, Venom, about corrupt government agencies and again inspired by her battles with authorities, appeared in 2010, while a third, The Blue Death (2012), was a prescient takedown of the folly of privatising water supplies. “Business corrupts and big business corrupts absolutely is the message Brady is sharing here,” wrote the Guardian’s reviewer, Alison Flood.
In 2015, by now living in Oxford, Brady published a non-fiction book that once more drew on her own life. America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged was about Alger Hiss, the American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s, who was brought down by future president Richard Nixon, then a California congressman. Hiss was jailed and denounced as a communist spy.
Brady had met Hiss in 1960 at dinner in Manhattan and remained friends with him until his death in 1996. Her book was aimed at clearing the supposed traitor’s name. “This is probably the biggest and longest lasting cover-up in history,” Brady told Susanna Rustin, the Guardian’s interviewer.
Her decade’s-worth of research into Hiss was inspired in part by the fact that he was another victim of injustice.
Brady is survived by Alexander.
• Joan Brady, writer and ballet dancer, born 4 December 1939; died 13 June 2024
