Beryl Bainbridge

Dame Beryl Bainbridge DBE
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British

Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE (21 November 1932–2 July 2010) was an English novelist.

Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as "a national treasure". In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Biography

Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool and raised in nearby Formby. Her parents were Richard Bainbridge and Winifred, née Baines. Although she gave her date of birth in Who's Who and elsewhere as 21 November 1934, she was born on 21 November 1932. Her birth was registered between January and March 1933."Index entry". FreeBMD. ONS. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |accessmonthday= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |accessyear= ignored (|access-date= suggested) (help). When German former prisoner of war Harry Arno Franz wrote to her in November 1947, he mentioned her 15th birthday.

Even as a small child, Beryl enjoyed writing, and by the age of 10 she was keeping a diary. Beryl had elocution lessons and, when she was 11, appeared on the "Northern Children’s Hour" radio show with Billie Whitelaw and Judith Chalmers. Bainbridge was expelled from Merchant Taylors' Girls' School, Crosby, when she was 14 because she was caught with a "dirty rhyme" (as she later described it), written by someone else, in her gymslip pocket. That summer, she fell in love with a former German POW who was waiting to be repatriated. For the next six years, the couple corresponded and tried to get permission for the German man to return to Britain so that they could be married. However, they never got this and the relationship ended in 1953.

In the following year (1954), Beryl married artist Austin Davies. The two divorced soon after, leaving Bainbridge a single mother of two children. She later had a third child by Alan Sharp, a daughter who is the actress Rudi Davies. In 1958, she attempted suicide by putting her head in a gas oven.

Beryl Bainbridge spent her early years working as an actress, and she appeared in one 1961 episode of the soap opera Coronation Street playing an anti-nuclear protester.

To help fill her time, Bainbridge began to write, primarily based on incidents from her childhood. Her first novel, Harriet Said..., was rejected by several publishers, one of whom found the central characters "repulsive almost beyond belief". It was eventually published in 1972, four years after her third novel (Another Part of the Wood). Her second and third novels were published (1967..8) and were received well by critics although they failed to earn much money. Seven more novels were written and published during the 1970s, of which the fifth, Injury Time, was awarded the Whitbread prize for best novel in 1977.

In the late 1970s, she wrote a screenplay based on her novel Sweet William. The movie Sweet William, starring Sam Waterston, was released in 1979.

From 1980 onwards, eight more novels appeared. The 1989 novel, An Awfully Big Adventure was adapted into a film in 1995 starring Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant.

In the 1990s, Bainbridge turned to historical fiction. These novels continued to be popular with critics, but this time, were also commercially successful. Among her historical fiction novels are Every Man for Himself, about the 1912 Titanic disaster, for which Bainbridge won the 1996 Whitbread Awards prize for best novel, and Master Georgie, set during the Crimean War, for which she won the 1998 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Her last novel, According to Queeney, is a fictionalized account of the last years of the life of Samuel Johnson as seen through the eyes of Queeney Thrale, eldest daughter of Henry Thrale and Hester Thrale; it received wide acclaim.

From the 1990s, Bainbridge also served as a theatre critic for the monthly magazine The Oldie. Her reviews rarely contained negative content, and were usually published after the play had closed.

In 2000, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

In June 2001, Bainbridge was awarded an honorary degree by the Open University as Doctor of the University.

In 2003, she was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature together with Thom Gunn. In 2005, the British Library acquired many of Bainbridge's private letters and diaries.

Throughout the year following Bainbridge's 71st birthday in November 2005, her grandson Charlie Russell produced a documentary, Beryl's Last Year, about her life. Bainbridge believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that she was destined to die at the age of 71 like her father, her mother, and nine other relatives. The documentary detailed her upbringing and her attempts to write a final novel (Dear Brutus, which she decided to leave unfinished); it was broadcast in the United Kingdom on 2 June 2007 on BBC Four.

In 2009, Beryl Bainbridge donated the short story Goodnight Children, Everywhere to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Air' collection.

Bainbridge is the patron of The People's Book Prize and will continue to be so.

Bainbridge died on 2 July 2010 in a London hospital after her cancer recurred.

Bibliography

Novels

• A Weekend with Claud (1967)
• Another Part of the Wood (1968)
• Harriet Said... (1972)
• The Dressmaker (US title The Secret Glass) (1973) – Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) – Shortlisted for Booker Prize, won the Guardian Fiction Prize
• Sweet William (1975)
• A Quiet Life (1976)
• Injury Time (1977)
• Young Adolf (1978)
• Another Part of the Wood (revised edn) (1979)
• Winter Garden (1980)
• A Weekend with Claude (revised edn) (1981)
• Watson's Apology (1984)
• An Awfully Big Adventure (1989) – Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• The Birthday Boys (1991)
• Every Man for Himself (1996) – Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• Master Georgie (1998) – Shortlisted for Booker Prize
• According to Queeney (2001)

Short stories

• Mum and Mr Armitage (1985)
• Collected Stories (1994)

Non-fiction

• English Journey (1984)
• Forever England: North and South (1987)
• Something Happened Yesterday (1993)
• Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre (2005)

External links

• The Paris Review Interview

• Beryl Bainbridge at IMDb
• Guardian interview
• "Author page" at The Guardian
• BBC audio interviews
• Beryl Bainbridge Criticism (Vol. 131)
• Beryl Bainbridge biography
• Template:Contemporary writers
• The Oldie Magazine
• Beryl Bainbridge, Mordant Novelist, Is Dead at 77, The New York Times, 2 July 2010
• Beryl Bainbridge: 1932 - 2010, Thought Catalog