Sally Beauman obituary

Sally Beauman, who has died aged 71, was that rare phenomenon – a writer whose prose sang and who could at the same time tell stories that captivated millions. Her first novel, Destiny, appeared in 1987, when critical hierarchies were far more rigid than today. The gilded lettering of its cover indicated romance or a romantic saga – a women-only genre distrusted even by feminists, and mocked under the block- or bonkbuster tag. This in turn meant that the critical accolade that might well have been her due was slow in coming.

Headlines of record-breaking million-dollar advances for a first novel, true in her case, only abetted literary disdain. None of this worried readers: Destiny topped the New York Times bestseller list, as well as the charts in the UK, Canada, Australia and South Africa, and was translated into some 20 languages. Like her beloved Brontës, Beauman had an uncommon gift for immersing readers in narrative and holding them there – whatever the subject – until the end. She could bring trailer parks in the deep American south or antique-laden aristocratic interiors to life. She could evoke shades of character. And she could write sex – no mean feat. She was always alive to the fact that sex was never simply sex.

Her second novel, Dark Angel (1990), was even better than the first – an early exploration of what was only beginning to be known as child abuse. Through the 90s came a trio of mysteries or romantic thrillers, Lovers and Liars (1994), Danger Zones (1996) and Sextet (1997), which probed the ruthlessness of the press and political scandal. In 2001 there was a shift to different terrain. Commissioned by the New Yorker in 1994 to write a piece on Daphne du Maurier’s popular classic Rebecca, a novel she stated was an anti-romance, “a clever, cunning and subversive attack on the very genre to which it would be consigned”, Beauman found that Du Maurier would not leave her alone.

Perhaps there was some identification with the author and her dismissal by critics at play. In an article about Du Maurier, she wrote: “She was a ‘romantic novelist’, and having shoved her into that particular wastebin, the critics could duly wash their hands of her. Thus was Du Maurier ‘named’ and categorised as a writer, much to her resentment. The tag was lazy and inaccurate, and the question of how women are named and categorised (and the ironies and inexactitudes inherent in that process) was of course central to the themes of Rebecca. Not one of the reviewers, busily pigeonholing, noticed that. Did these reviews affect sales? Not one jot.”

Rebecca’s Tale (2001) came into being slowly. Beauman wanted to explore the absent Rebecca, the femme who had been fatale only to herself and who had come to us through the eyes of her husband, that Bluebeard of the gentry Max de Winter.

As Linda Grant wrote in the Guardian, “Rebecca’s Tale revisits the story … from the point of view of the one person denied a voice: Rebecca herself, the wilful, arrogant, promiscuous and mysterious first Mrs de Winter. She, not the wet and nameless narrator, was the character any reader with gumption admired and identified with.” Beauman’s tale had done “an extraordinary thing”: her Rebecca really was “the one Du Maurier had omitted”, yet she retained all the enigma of the original. While both women were great storytellers, Grant noted, Beauman “really is the better prose stylist”.

Two further novels followed, The Landscape of Love (2005) and The Visitors (2014), the first in part a love-affair with Emily Brontë’s ability to evoke place, the second a re-creation of the disputed archaeological dig that unearthed Tutankhamun’s tomb. By the time this last book appeared, Beauman’s imagination was entangled with death in a more immediate way. Her husband’s health had become precarious.

She was born Sally Vanessa Kinsey-Miles in Paignton, Devon, where her mother, Gabriel, was staying with family while her father, Ronald, was in the RAF. She was brought up in the West Country. An only child, she adored her father, who taught her many skills including what became her formidable talents as a gardener. From Redland high school for girls in Bristol she went to Girton College, Cambridge. She read English literature and proved herself a remarkable actor, taking on lead roles in Strindberg, Büchner and Turgenev, as Christopher Beauman, the economist whom she met towards the end of her first year, fondly remembers. In 1966, they married, an act in part propelled by the rules that governed travel to the US with his Harkness fellowship for graduate school in Washington and New York. They were to split up in the early 70s and divorce in 1976.

In America, Sally took work as a journalist and joined the staff of the newly launched New York magazine. Her first assignment was to follow Norman Mailer to East Hampton on one of his wild film-making expeditions. The year was 1968, the tone distinctly Tom Wolfe. Mailer “and a cast of hundreds … all flaunting garments guaranteed in their brevity to keep their owners out of every eating place in town, erupted on to the peaceful streets with all the brilliance and suddenness of a volcano on to a latterday Pompeii”.

She quickly became an associate editor and back in London in 1970 briefly the youngest ever editor of Queen magazine, before moving into freelance feature writing and interviewing for Vogue, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Observer. She was the first winner of the Catherine Pakenham award for journalism.

She met the great Shakespearean actor, Alan Howard, when interviewing him for the Telegraph magazine in 1970. Romance – and it needs to be called that with their two fiery temperaments – blossomed and lasted a lifetime. Together with their son, James, born in 1974, they lived for a period in Stratford and then in London, though with sporadic periods in New York or Greece when Howard’s productions travelled. Beauman’s two non-fictions, one a history of the RSC, and her early pseudonymous romances, came from their son’s childhood, a time ill-suited to the tempo of journalism. It was when our boys were at playschool that I first met her. We were neighbours and became fast friends.

She was a proud, loyal, fiercely private, beautiful and generous woman – at all ages. Her intelligence was incisive and broad. She could tell you everything, not only about the latest Man Booker list, but about gardening and furniture restoration or how to render a wall. In fact, she was often dressed in a paint-spattered shirt and jeans and could be found, between books, up a ladder touching up a ceiling – before donning more elegant attire to go to the theatre.

Her cooking was divine and as meticulous as the detailed emails that became legendary among her friends. She could lay out exemplary recipes, the best garden plants for shade, or precise routes through France, through the Cotswolds or to Barra, the island in the Outer Hebrides where over years she lovingly restored Sir Compton Mackenzie’s house, in which Alan, his grandnephew, had spent so many holidays as a boy.

In his last years of failing health, she looked after Alan – they married in 2004 – with a vehement devotion, exhorting the NHS to do its best. She outlived him by only 17 months. Few of her friends knew that a first bout of cancer had been overcome while Alan was still alive. The second could not be.

We often met over a cuppa to talk about life, literature and our writing. The last time I saw her before she went up to Northumberland to stay with her son, his wife, Lucy, and her two beloved grandchildren, she was very frail. But her voice grew stronger as we began to talk about the street we lived on, with its over-representation of writers and actors. Someone should write a book about it, I suggested. A brilliant idea, she laughed, concurring. But only Sally, with her remarkable powers of evoking place, could have written it.

She is survived by her son and grandchildren.