British historian and author Juliet Gardiner, who was known for three major works about Britain during World War II, life in the 1930s, and the place of the Blitz in national mythology, died June 16. She was 82. The Guardian reported that at the turn of the millennium, she "came to the realization that though she had a respectable reputation as a freelance historian, she had yet to write the books that would be unmistakably hers."
Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 (2004) provided a panoramic narrative and portrait of the Home Front. "Sixty years after the end of the war," she wrote in her foreword, "if the 'big picture' of a nation united in courageously facing a common enemy holds steady--as it surely does--so too do the 'short stories,' the details of people's varied experiences of war that complicate and nuance that picture."
The Thirties: An Intimate History (2010), "arguably her masterwork," was made special by "the unerring, in-depth treatment of the too often overlooked in-betweens--above all, those white-collar, lower-middle class people who found in rapidly growing suburbia a balm for their anxious sense of social status and a world they could call their own," the Guardian wrote.
Later in 2010, to mark the 70th anniversary, The Blitz: The British Under Attack was released. The Guardian's reviewer, Hester Vaizey, praised it as "a treasure trove of vivid, detailed anecdotes," but the book also tackled full on the place of the Blitz in British national mythology.
"All three books are underpinned by a clear belief in the social historian's abiding purpose. This was, in Juliet's own later words, the 'attempt to capture the historical moment and what mattered to those living in it,' " the Guardian noted.
In 1979, Gardiner became assistant editor of History Today, followed by three years as editor beginning in 1982. For a decade and a half, she was "in effect a jobbing historian," while holding posts at Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1985-89) and Middlesex University (1992-2000). The Guardian observed that during that time she wrote several books, "but they were mostly tie-ins to either a TV series, as with D-Day: Those Who Were There (1994) and The 1940s House (2000), or an exhibition, as with Over Here: The GIs in Wartime Britain (1992) and From The Bomb to the Beatles (1999), as opposed to books indisputably in their own right."
Historian David Kynaston, who wrote Gardiner's obituary for the Guardian, stated: "The golden spell of her heavyweight trio of books started shortly after I first met Juliet, through our shared literary agent, Deborah Rogers: Juliet told me that her particular dark night of the soul had come on Millennium Eve in New York. The success it drove her to ended abruptly when she was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor, and started using a wheelchair."
Plans for new, research-dependent books had to be dropped, but with the help of her friend Lara Feigel, in 2017 Gardiner published a memoir, Joining the Dots: A Woman in Her Time.