Novelist, biographer, and "historian of place" Gillian Tindall, who wrote books that bridged the boundaries between fiction, memoir, and history and "explored with a novelist's intuition and historian's precision how the hidden past shapes places and the people who inhabit them," died October 1, the Guardian reported. She was 87.
No Name in the Street (1959) was the first of Tindall's more than a dozen novels and short story collections. She won the 1972 Somerset Maugham award for Fly Away Home. Her nonfiction work includes The Born Exile: George Gissing (1974) and The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village (1977). Célestine: Voices from a French Village (1995), "begins with the chance find of a cache of letters in a French farmhouse: a key to revealing the intimate lives of rural families over generations," the Guardian noted.
Tindall considered The Fields Beneath and Célestine her best works, and both were published in multiple editions, with Célestine being released in French to critical praise. In France, she was known as the author of Célestine, while in India she was the author of City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (1982). She was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres for her contribution to French culture.
Each new book adopted a distinctive historical framework, the Guardian noted, citing as examples "the story of a single house over 450 years--The House By the Thames and the People Who Lived There (2006); an account of how Crossrail's modern line follows an ancient path through the city, in The Tunnel Through Time (2016); "a clutch of talismanic objects that, placed in context, illuminate wider themes in history" in The Pulse Glass: And the Beat of Other Hearts (2019). Her final completed book, the upcoming Journal of a Man Unknown, marked a return to fiction.
Tindall attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to study English literature. She earned a first-class degree, which was was followed shortly afterward by publication of her debut novel. She then conducted research for the Stepney Welfare Association, "interviewing widows in their East End front rooms. Many faced relocation as their neighborhoods were sacrificed to what Gillian called the 'blinkered enthusiasm' of postwar planners. The destruction of these communities engaged her lifelong interest in urban conservation," the Guardian noted.