Novelist. An appreciation

Born: October 20, 1937;

Died: January 20, 2017

I FIRST met Emma Tennant, the novelist, memoirist, magazine founder, editor and one-time paramour of Ted Hughes, in 2006. I had interviewed her in the past, and had reviewed her books, when she took me to lunch at an Italian restaurant somewhere in Kensington and Chelsea. I was an impoverished freelancer; she very aristocratically insisted on ordering Dover Sole for us both. After much conversation, three courses and two bottles of wine, she sent the bill back for being "too much". Then she paid for the adjusted amount and insisted her husband Tim drive me to the nearest Tube station.

The second time we met she was already laid low with the devastating illness that would eventually claim her. But that tremendous generosity, that intellectual spark, that dedication to all things literary was still there. She gave me 26 pages of a novel she wanted me to write with her; six months later she phoned to tell me to carry it on, alone. She did not have the strength for her part. Her last published novel was The Beautiful Child, in 2012.

Emma Tennant was born in London in 1937. Her father was the second Baron Glenconner, whose family home in Scotland, a baronial mansion called Glen, was where she spent her youth. Her mother was Glenconner’s second wife, and her half-brother, Colin, who inherited the title, was once linked with Princess Margaret, an association that Tennant explored in a superb mix of fact and fiction in her 2009 novel, Waiting For Princes Margaret.

Tennant’s family might not have been literary but her first love was: her first marriage was to Sebastian Yorke, the son of the writer, Henry Green ("I am marrying a ghost; the ghost of poetry," she wrote in her 1998 memoir, Girlitude). The marriage broke down when she was only 23; just four years later she would publish her first novel, The Colour of Rain. Partly autobiographical, it would be flung into a wastepaper basket when it was submitted for the Prix Formentor, as an example of "British decadence". The experience shook her; two more children and two more marriages followed and in 1973 her second novel, The Time of the Crack, appeared. She also launched a literary magazine, Bananas, during those years, which was when she had her affair with Hughes. Was she wanted by him, she wonders in her controversial 1999 memoir, Burnt Diaries, "to provide the story?"

For the next 40 years, Tennant would herself provide the story. Feminism, magical realism and postmodernism would intermingle in astonishing, startling novels like The Bad Sister (1978), Queen of Stones (1982), and Two Women of London (1989). Tennant was an Anglo-Scottish Angela Carter, ripping up traditional narratives and rewriting the rules of what constituted female literary genius. She was not an academic, but these novels were challenging, transgressive works, and intellectually enormous. Never a writer to be kind to her readers, she did not follow an easy road.

The 1990s and 2000s saw her love of the literary text, and her fascination with intertextuality, lead her to tackle iconic works by Jane Austen, the Brontes, Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson, and offer feminist versions of classics, with Faustine (1991), Pemberley (1993), Tess (1993) and An Unequal Marriage (1994). Increasingly she sought the gaps in those famous stories to make new statements, and also to find echoes in her own life and upbringing, in novels like The Harp Lesson (2005), Heathcliff’s Tale (2005) The French Dancer’s Bastard (2006), and Seized (2008).

Her three volumes of memoir, Girlitude, Strangers, and Burnt Diaries, appeared during that decade when she was assessing much about her life. But she did not stop her fiction. In total, she wrote almost 30 novels in a 50-year period. Her Anglo-Scottish status, her class and experiences perhaps stopped Scottish literature from claiming her as one of its own as much as it should have. It is also time for her particular brand of female literary genius to be embraced, too. For in the words of Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Tennant was "the first of a new genus…not born to tread in the beaten track".

Emma Tennant and is survived by her husband, Tim Owens and her three children.

LESLEY MCDOWELL