Though academically brilliant, my mother, Catherine Peters, who has died aged 94, did not go to university until she was 46, when she moved to Oxford with her second husband, the psychiatrist Anthony Storr.
She achieved a top first in English literature shortly before her 50th birthday, subsequently becoming for many years a much-loved and respected teacher of English at Somerville College, as well as an acclaimed literary biographer of 19th-century authors. In 1987 she published Thackeray’s Universe, followed in 1993 by The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins. Her biography Charles Dickens appeared in 1998 and Byron in 2000.
The daughter of the literary agent AD Peters and his first wife, Helen MacGregor, Catherine was born in London and brought up by her mother and stepfather, the crime writer Anthony Berkeley Cox (Francis Iles), who, she later told us, sexually abused her from the age of 11. Among her early memories two stood out vividly: a severe governess, with the Dickensian name of Mrs Maskell; and being told, aged four, to address a stranger in the drawing room (AD Peters) as “Daddy”. “Daddy?”, she wondered, “what is a daddy?” But he picked her up on his shoulders and danced around the room with her, after which she always liked him.
Catherine attended Francis Holland school in London but during the second world war the family moved to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, and she went to the local village school, where she enjoyed helping the younger children learn to read. An avid and precocious reader herself, she had read Jane Eyre by the age of eight.
She had a brother, Richard, seven years older, who was killed in Burma near the end of the war, and a half-sister, Hilary Peters. She told us her stepfather prevented her from going to university, afraid that the abuse would come to light, and instead, in 1952, she married John Barton and they had four sons. A loving father but serial philanderer, he deserted her in 1961 (they were divorced in 1965).
Around 1967 she went to work as a publisher’s reader at Jonathan Cape, juggling this with bringing up her children, the second of whom, Thomas, drowned when he was eight. My brothers and I remember her cramming us into her Mini car, luggage precariously strapped to the roof rack, for the long drive and ferry-trip to holidays in Ireland. She married Anthony in 1970.
A more or less secret strand throughout her life was her love of poetry, but she had to wait until the age of 84 to see a book of her fine poems in print (Sea Change, 2014). In the introduction to that volume, she traces the genesis of the title poem back to the “rebirth” she experienced through academic success at Oxford: the “acceptance of a self that had been in hiding … now inexorably launched on an existence of its own”.
An indomitable survivor, she had an uncompromising honesty and critical acuity that could sometimes be unnerving, but these were tempered by great courage, kindness and generosity.
Anthony died in 2001. She is survived by her sons Robert, Will and me, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
