British author Jane Gardam, who "was regarded by many as the unsung heroine of English fiction... and won a formidable array of prizes," died April 28 at age 96. Gardam was perhaps best known for Old Filth (2004), which in a 2015 BBC survey was voted among the 100 greatest British novels. It featured a central character who reappeared in two follow-up novels, The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) and Last Friends (2013).
Although Gardam "never achieved the popular acclaim of contemporaries such as Margaret Drabble or Penelope Lively, she attracted a select army of admirers... Her strengths lay in an old-fashioned skill for storytelling, an instinctive feel for period and an ability to get under the skin of her characters. These qualities attracted a wide and faithful readership; she was never out of print and became one of the few literary novelists to make a respectable living out of fiction," the Telegraph wrote.
Gardam's The Hollow Land (1981) won the Whitbread Award (children's book category), and she took a second Whitbread for The Queen of the Tambourine (1991) in the adult category. God on the Rocks was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978. Her other books include A Long Way from Verona (1971), Black Faces, White Faces (1975), The Sidmouth Letters (1980), The Pangs of Love (1983), Crusoe's Daughter (1986), Showing the Flag (1989), Going into a Dark House (1994), Faith Fox (1996), Missing the Midnight (1997), and The Flight of the Maidens (2000).
Diana Athill, reviewing Last Friends in the Daily Telegraph, praised the author's skill in turning a "very funny story... with no resort to sentimentality, into a keenly moving study of old age." Gardam, she noted, "could indeed write well about linoleum if she wanted to, but what she excels at is writing about the human heart and mind."
In 1999 she won the Heywood Hill literary prize for "a lifetime's contribution to our enjoyment of books," which prompted thoughts about her own mortality: "I have not perhaps given enough thought to stopping breathing," Gardam observed. "My will is more or less in order, though I am becoming sad that the bequests are getting fewer as friends drop from their perches and will never know I cared. I come from a very long-living family, all hypochondriacs but so enjoying their condition that they never seemed to grow old until they were suddenly gone."
She was one of the first novelists published by Abacus, an imprint of Little, Brown. The Guardian noted that Richard Beswick, her publisher, said she was "hugely loved by us all. Her warmth, humor and wisdom are quite irreplaceable."
