Beryl bainbridge biography

When Humphrey Carpenter reviewed Beryl Bainbridge’s 1984 novel Watson’s ­Apology, he was warmly enthusiastic: it was, he wrote, “that old cliché, ‘a small masterpiece’”. It was the second of her works – the first was Young Adolf, which appeared in 1978 – to move outside her own experience, the girlhood and young womanhood she had refashioned for her fiction in books such as The Dressmaker and The Bottle Factory Outing. Watson’s Apology draws on the story of an Anglican clergyman convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death in 1872. Carpenter particularly noted the presentation of Watson’s relationship with his wife, Anne. “The marriage was in many ways a failure from the start,” he wrote. “Neither partner was capable of achieving love, though both wanted affection. What the book succeeds in showing is the element of failure in all relationships.”

That final sentence could apply to what Brendan King’s biography succeeds in doing with regard to the many tangled and difficult relationships Bainbridge similarly embarked on, abandoned or struggled to maintain. Her worst fear about her partners – her husband, the painter Austin Davies, and the lovers she took throughout her life, including Colin Haycraft, who was for many years her publisher at Duckworth – was a perceived lack of commitment. When one of  her lovers, Mick Green, told her that he needed a sense of freedom to love her, she despaired. “By hurting my stupid pride and making me feel so unloved he’s shrunken my love for him,” she confided to her diary in 1959. “Its [sic] so sad. You can’t be truthful or you lose the love. And I’ve lost mine . . .”

What she never lost, however, was her remarkable creative determination. That she was “the Booker bridesmaid” (her novels were shortlisted for the prize five times without ever winning) is just about as much of a cliché as Carpenter’s line about a small masterpiece. After her death in 2010, she was awarded the somewhat creepy honour

English writer (1932–2010)

Dame Beryl Margaret BainbridgeDBE (21 November 1932 – 2 July 2010) was an English writer. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class. She won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996, and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as a national treasure. In 2008, The Times named Bainbridge on their list of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Biography

Early life

Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was born in Liverpool's Allerton suburb on 21 November 1932, the daughter of Winifred Baines and Richard Bainbridge. She grew up in the nearby town of Formby. Although she often gave her date of birth as 21 November 1934, she was born in 1932 and her birth was registered in the first quarter of 1933. When German former prisoner of war Harry Arno Franz wrote to her in November 1947, he mentioned her 15th birthday.

Bainbridge enjoyed writing, and by the age of 10 she was keeping a diary. She had elocution lessons and, when she was 11, appeared on the Northern Children's Hour radio show, alongside Billie Whitelaw and Judith Chalmers. She was expelled from Merchant Taylors' Girls' School in Great Crosby when she was caught with a "dirty rhyme" (as she later described it) written by someone else in her gymslip pocket. She then went on to study at Cone-Ripman School in Tring (now the Tring Park School for the Performing Arts), where she found she was good at history, English, and art. The summer she left school, she fell in love with former German prisoner of war Harry Arno Franz who was waiting to be repatriated. For the next six years, the couple corresponded and tried to get permission for him to return to Britain so that they could marry, but permission wa

Nationality: British. Born: Liverpool, 1934. Education: Merchant Taylors' School, Liverpool; ballet school in Tring, Hertfordshire. Family: Married Austin Davies in 1954 (divorced 1959); one son and two daughters. Career: Actress with repertory theaters in Liverpool, Windsor, Salisbury, London, and Dundee, 1949-60; cellar woman in a bottle factory, London, 1970; clerk, Gerald Duckworth Ltd., publishers, London, 1961-73. Presenter, Forever England television series, 1986. Since 1987 weekly columnist, London Evening Standard.Awards:Guardian Fiction prize, 1974; Whitbread award, 1977. D. Litt.: University of Liverpool, 1986. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1978; Whitbread Award, 1996; W.H. Amith Award, 1998; Commonwealth Eurasian Prize, 1998.

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