We were saddened by the news last week that the novelist Jane Gardam had died. She was 96 years old. Born Jean Pearson in Redcar on the North Yorkshire coast in 1928, where her father was a teacher, Gardam moved to London after the Second World War to read English at Bedford College. ‘A treasure of English contemporary writing’, according to Ian McEwan, she was an indefatigable storyteller whose work spanned almost half a century. Her nine adult novels include the Booker-nominated God on the Rocks (1978) and 2004’s Old Filth, named as one of the BBC’s 100 greatest British novels in 2015, while among her many works of fiction for children and young adults, The Hollow Land won the 1983 Whitbread Children’s Book Award.
Jane Gardam had a long and happy association with the Authors’ Club. In 1988 she agreed to adjudicate our Best First Novel Award, which she awarded to Peter Benson for The Levels, a dark coming-of-age love story set in Somerset. In his memoir Circus of Dreams (Constable), the critic John Walsh, now President of the Authors’ Club, recalls his time on the judging panel of the 1991 Whitbread Novel Prize, which was awarded to Gardam’s ‘touching, funny and mischievous epistolary novel The Queen of the Tambourine’.
In November that year, Gardam delivered a keynote speech to the Authors’ Club’s centenary supper at the Arts Club in Dover Street: ‘As a drinker will always find a bar and a poker player always finds a game,’ she declared, ‘writers will always find each other,’ before pointing out how privileged we were to be gathered together when in many countries merely ‘to admit to being a member of an authors’ club is to risk a sentence of death’. She went on to describe her work with PEN, drawing attention to cases of persecuted and imprisoned writers around the world, including that of the Burmese poet Min Lu, who had disappeared after writing a poem critical of the military regime in his country. (He was released from prison in September 1992).
Jane Gardam was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1976 and appointed an OBE in 2009. Her final novel, Last Friends, appeared in 2013, completed the trilogy begun with Old Filth, and was shortlisted for the Folio Prize. She will be remembered for a substantial and significant body of work that, in the words of the novelist and long-standing friend of the Authors’ Club Maggie Gee, ‘crackles with energy, variety, sensuous richness’.
C.J. Schüler
Jane Gardam’s 2017 appearance on Desert Island Discs is available on BBC Sounds: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b098gmsm
Her 2022 interview in The Paris Review can be found here: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/7878/the-art-of-fiction-no-251-jane-gardam