Emma Tennant

Emma Tennant
Emma Christina Tennant FRSL (20 October 1937 – 21 January 2017) was an English novelist and editor of Scottish extraction, known for a post-modern approach to her fiction, often imbued with fantasy or magic. Several of her novels give a feminist or dreamlike twist to classic stories, such as Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. She also published under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy.
Early life
Tennant was of Scottish extraction, the daughter of Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, and Elizabeth, Lady Glenconner (née Powell). She remembered her father as a mix of rage and benevolence. She was the niece of Edward and Stephen Tennant, and the half-sister of Colin Tennant, later the third Baron Glenconner, from her father's first marriage.
Born in London, she spent the World War II years at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her parents were regularly absent, while The Glen "was the strangest possible place. I knew no other world at all until I was nine." The family then resettled in London. Tennant was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, but left when she was 15. She spent some time at an Oxford finishing school, studying languages and the history of art, and a year in Paris at The Louvre. In the mid-1960s, her parents built a house in Corfu, known as Rovinia. She spent much time there throughout her life and later in 2001, published a book about the building of the house, entitled A House in Corfu.
Career
Tennant worked as a travel writer for Queen magazine and an editor for Vogue. Her first novel, The Colour of Rain, was published under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy (chosen with the help of an ouija board) when she was 26. Submitted to the Spanish Prix Formentor, the response of the chair of the judges, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia meant that she suffered writer's block for some years afterwards. According to Tennant, he "tossed my book into a wastepaper basket and declared, 'This book stands for the decadence of British contemporary culture.'" It was not until 1973 that her second novel, The Time of the Crack, was first published. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine, Bananas, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists. She was the editor of the Viking series Lives of Modern Women.
A large number of books by Tennant followed: thrillers, children's books, fantasies, and several revisionist takes on classic novels, including a sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Pemberley. In later years, she began to treat her own life in such books as Girlitude and Burnt Diaries (both published in 1999), the second of which details her affair with Ted Hughes. "He was so odd – to put it mildly," she wrote. The French Dancer's Bastard, which recounts the life of Adèle, the daughter of Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre, was published in October 2006. The Autobiography of the Queen, written with Hilary Bailey, was published in October 2007.
Personal life
Tennant was married four times, including to the journalist and author Christopher Booker between 1963 and 1968 and the political writer Alexander Cockburn between 13 December 1968 and 1973. She had one son and two daughters. Her son, from her first marriage, is the author Matthew Yorke. Her older daughter Daisy, from her marriage to Cockburn, teaches the Alexander technique. Her younger daughter Rose Dempsey, from a relationship with the publisher Michael Dempsey, works for the Serpentine Galleries. A lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, she married in April 2008 her partner of 33 years, Tim Owens, saying it was not, or not only for tax policies introduced by the government of Gordon Brown.
Emma Tennant died on 21 January 2017 in a London hospital from posterior cortical atrophy, a form of Alzheimer's disease.
Selected bibliography
Novels
The Colour of Rain (as Catherine Aydy), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964
The Time of the Crack, London: Cape, 1973; as The Crack, London: Penguin, 1978
The Last of the Country House Murders, London: Cape, 1974; New York, Nelson, 1976
Hotel de Dream, London: Gollancz, 1976
The Bad Sister, London: Gollancz; New York: Coward McCann, 1978
Wild Nights, London: Cape, 1979; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980
Alice Fell, London: Cape, 1980
Queen of Stones, London: Cape, 1982
Woman Beware Woman, London: Cape, 1983; as The Half-Mother, Boston: Little Brown, 1985
Black Marina, London: Faber: 1985
The Adventures of Robina, by Herself, London: Faber, 1986; New York:, Persea, 1987. Series: The Cycle of the Sun The House of Hospitalities, London: Viking, 1987
A Wedding of Cousins, London: Viking, 1988
The Magic Drum, London: Viking, 1989
Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde, London: Faber, 1989 (after Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Sisters and Strangers, London: Grafton, 1990
Faustine, London: Faber: 1991
Pemberley; or, Pride and Prejudice Continued, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993; as Pemberley: A Sequel to Pride and Prejudice, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993
Tess, London: HarperCollins, 1993
An Unequal Marriage; or, Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later, London: Sceptre; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994
Travesties, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Emma in Love: Jane Austen's Emma Continued, London: Fourth Estate, 1996
Non-fiction
A House in Corfu, London: Jonathan Cape, 2001
Autobiography
Strangers: A Family Romance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1998
Girlitude, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999
Burnt Diaries, Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999
References
External links
Literary Encyclopedia article on Emma Tennant
Canongate Books biography of Emma Tennant
Emma Tennant bibliography at Fantastic Fiction
Lesley McDowell, "Two sides to every story – Emma Tennant Interview", The Scotsman, 31 July 2008
Dee O'Connell, This much I know – Emma Tennant, The Observer, 3 November 2002
David Smith, "How Gordon got Emma to the altar ... 33 years late", The Observer, 20 April 2008
Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archive, and Rare Book Library, Emory University: Emma Tennant collection, 1973–1998
1937 births
2017 deaths
Daughters of barons
English women novelists
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
People educated at St Paul's Girls' School
20th-century English novelists
20th-century English women writers
Writers from London
English people of Scottish descent
Emma
20th-century pseudonymous writers
Pseudonymous women writers