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Many American readers have come for the first time on Jane Gardam's fiction through her 2004 novel Old dirt, which sold well on both sides of the Atlantic. He tells the story of the life of a retirement judge, Sir Edward Feathers, and became the first of a trilogy, with The man in the wooden hat (2009) and Gardam's final novel, Last friends (2013). As she said to the Paris Review in 2022, the consequences occurred somewhat by accident. “I didn't at all considered it as a trilogy, but I rather missed the characters, you know?”
For his many fans, Gardam, who died at the age of 96, was a longtime columnist and loved by the life of the British middle class, with his mixture of deleted emotional pain and delicious absurdity. While the feathers were its most famous creation (Old dirt was on a list of the 2015 BBC 2015 of the best British books of all time), she had always had the gift of creating memorable characters, starting with Jessica Vye, the animated heroine of her beginnings, Far from Verona (1971).
The story of Jessica (she is a “born writer”) reflects a large part of the background of Gardam as a church in the 1940s in Redcar, on the English coast of the Northeast. Born Jean Pearson in 1928, her father William was professor of mathematics and master of the house. His mother Kathleen was deeply linked in the life of the Anglican Church and a passionate reader. At a time when smart girls of limited financial means rarely achieved in higher education, Gardam learned from zero in six months, taught by one of his father's colleagues. Passing the Latin examination meant that it could win a scholarship at the Bedford College of the University of London to study English. When she moved to London, Jean became Jane.
After university, Gardam worked as a mobile librarian for the injured soldiers in the Red Cross hospitals, and in journalism, first at the Weldon's Ladies' Journal, a title deeply focused on the servant (Jane was dismissed for having “too many ideas”). She then worked for the literary editor at Time and Tide Magazine, and had to deposit a packet of books at TS Eliot's Home, where she was disappointed to meet only her huge cat, imminent on the stairs.
After marrying David Gardam, a lawyer in 1954, Jane focused on family life with three children, Tim, Kitty and Tom. She started to write until 1970, when Tom, her youngest, was five years old “then never stopped”. She was a prolific fiction writer, publishing adult and children novels and several news books.
The family lived in Wimbledon in southern London – the framework of The queen of the tambourine (1991) – But the real imaginative locus of Gardam was his childhood house. Although she left Redcar at 18 and never returned to live in the North, the drama of growing in wartime and then in the midst of post-war austerity, remained a vital part of her creative imagination and she returned to it several times. Theft of young girls (2000), for example, tells the story of three friends leaving school in the Yorkshire just at the end of the Second World War.
Gardam has won numerous prizes during his career, including two Whitbread Awards, and was pre -selected for the 1978 Booker Prize for God on the rocks. She was appointed OBE for literature services in 2009. Her first prize, however, was the first prize in David Higham fiction in 1975, awarded by the literary agency for her first new collection, Black faces, white faces. It was the start of a 50-year-old professional relationship, and she remained a client there for the rest of her life.
Her agent, Caroline Walsh, told FT that Gardam had inspired a huge loyalty of those who worked with her, as well as dedicated readers. Walsh told a letter from a “reader who had just gone through a period of trouble, (who said) the Old dirt The novels were my companions in a trip to a new life. ” In the 2010s, the old dirt trilogy became bestsellers in Germany, creating a new cohort of fans.
Gardam's fiction is full of mind, sometimes funny laugh – but never lights up on sorrow and the loss of its characters. She wrote from experience: her husband and their daughter Kitty died when Jane wrote the trilogy. As she said to the Revue de Paris: “Really, writing was my salvation. To survive, you turn to what you can do, I suppose.”
The writer Penelope Lively was a close friend and told the FT that the particular talent of Gardam as a novelist “was, for me, that the most admirable quality and the writer, which says the most by saying the least. She was brilliant to the economy, she was brilliant to the implications that were below the sentence.” For the reader, this gift meant “you always read something behind and under what was really online. And very few writers can do it. ”
Isabel Berwick
