R.I.P. Ann Schlee, 89, Carnegie nominee ("The Vandal," 1979)

Lenona

2023-12-10 16:18:32 UTC

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/ann-schlee-prize-winning-novelist-060000992.html?guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAMrfFfI1r0uvN6tXdeUuzayNMjaR0WJgVa5XnSYGq-FCfDPIf376On_BI03AQsFBPzS1CUjBSeEt6VO_nXpV8PfwBgMe8x5xMe4htKiZ2CbHWR0J5erexbN-i2ZLHmJrEQvC-kurjGoBPXRU1hCcNqd3o8O-fflDGWIXqifKSzmo
(same obit? - with photo and two book covers)

Ann Schlee, who has died aged 89, was one of those rare novelists who found success writing for both children and adults. The Vandal, a dystopian tale of alienation in Thatcherite Britain, won the 1980 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, while Rhine Journey, the story of a Victorian spinster’s emotional awakening on a European excursion, was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize and was nearly adapted by Tom Stoppard into a script.

Critics praised the verisimilitude of her period detail, not just in Rhine Journey, but also in The Proprietor (1983), about the 19th-century altruistic autocrat who owned the Scilly Isles, and Laing (1987), fictionalising the titular Scotsman’s ill-fated journey to Timbuktu in 1848. “Ann Schlee possesses a remarkable gift for enabling the reader to enter a past world, enlightened but unshackled by modern concepts and prejudices,” wrote The Times.

But although she counted Stoppard, Olivia Manning, Roy Hattersley and Jane Gardam among her admirers, her delicately observed period pieces did not, perhaps, make quite enough noise amid the bolder literary experimentalism that marked the 1980s and 1990s; Rhine Journey was beaten to the Booker by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.

Ann Schlee happily combined her writing with teaching – she worked with school refusers, and at evening institutes – and was sanguine about her books eventually falling out of print. As such, she was amazed when approached earlier this year by both American and British imprints eager to republish Rhine Journey. But it was a fitting transatlantic tribute for a writer who, despite living in England for most of her life, never lost her sense of identity as an American (not least because people were forever correcting her pronunciation and spelling), and who maintained a very dry Bostonian sense of humour.

Born in Greenwich, Connecticut on May 26 1934, “Citizen Schlee”, as she later called herself, spent her early years with her American mother Nancy (née Houghton) in her grandparents’ house, where her atheist grandmother had replaced the family bible on a lectern with a copy of Webster’s dictionary, while her British father, Major General (later Sir) Duncan Cumming, was away at war.

Mother and daughter sailed to Alexandria after the war to reunite with Cumming, by then a colonial administrator, responsible for the occupied Italian colonies. Her father’s subsequent postings meant that she spent periods of her childhood in Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea. A friend of her mother’s wept to see someone so young already so proficient at packing her own suitcase. Although not strictly autobiographical, her final novel, The Time in Aderra (1998) – about a teenager visiting her mother and stepfather in Africa, where he is the governor of a small British protectorate – certainly draws on these experiences.

She finished her schooling at Downe House in England, suffering grimly both the institution and climate. She wore a hot water bottle strapped under her uniform.

She met her future husband, the artist Nick Schlee, while reading English at Somerville College, Oxford. Her parents refused to agree to the marriage until Nick had secured a job, so after graduation she returned to America and taught at Rosemary Hall (now Choate) in Connecticut. Nick followed her, joining an advertising company in New York.

They returned to the UK in 1957, living first in Primrose Hill, north London, in a flat newly vacated by Amaryllis Fleming, the cellist daughter of Augustus John, before settling in a large but run-down house in Wandsworth. Hannah, the youngest of their four children, remembers the musical sound of water dripping into saucepans whenever it rained. “Fix the roof,” was her mother’s reply to the journalist who later asked what she would do with the winnings if Rhine Journey won the Booker.

She wrote the five children’s books she published between 1971 and 1980 by rising at five each morning before her children were awake. Recognising a fellow early bird, the local binmen went about their work as quietly as possible outside her window.

Ann Schlee is survived by her husband, and their three daughters and son.

Ann Schlee, born May 26 1934, died November 1 2023