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
