I first read Old Filth on the recommendation of a woman I worked with. She ran the breakfast club at a pre-prep school where I was a teaching assistant. Her mother went to bed early every night with a book, and had passed on Old Filth to my colleague, who in turn passed it to me.
This is a typical Gardam reader’s experience. Once you read Gardam, you start to find lots of other admirers of her work. Her books are not enthused about in cultural discourse, but they are passed from reader to reader; they are loved.
Gardam was not as famous as other novelists of the late twentieth century but she was enormously talented. Unlike some of her more famous peers, she excelled at novels, short stories, and fiction for young people. As well as Old Filth and its sequel I especially admire The Summer After the Funeral, The Sidmouth Letters, and The People on Privilege Hill. It is worthwhile however getting her collected stories as many of them are memorable and touching.
She was the sort of writer who married the moral and aesthetic without any fuss and with plenty of artistry. She had a great capacity for writing characters who were innocent, confused, affectionate, and developing. Her work is sharp and knowing but deeply sensitive. She doesn’t show off or write gaudy. Like many women writers of her generation, she is better than she is given credit for and her reputation ought to continue its steady rise.
As a student in London, Gardam studied with the Dickens scholar Kathleen Tillotson. She told the Paris Review in 2022
Latin was easy when I knew what I had to do. Then down I came to London, to Bedford College, which was in the middle of Regent’s Park. The college had a wonderful library. It was like being in paradise—and I had Kathleen Tillotson as a tutor. She was a nineteenth-century specialist. She edited Dickens, and she was very remote and strange, but I never lost touch with her. I went to see her just before she died, in 2001. She lived in the same house. There she was, lying in bed with a row of books above her head, and one of them was mine. I thought, I’ve made it!
Gardam was also a late bloomer, delayed by a long gap between children after losing a baby.
There were two years between Tim and Kitty, and then I lost a baby. That set me back a lot. I was very sad, and blamed myself. Nowadays one would have counseling, but that was a sign of weakness then. Eventually I had the little one, Tom, who was ten years younger than Tim. Very much my grandfather’s sort—a jolly fellow.
I wrote some stories when Tom, my youngest child, was five, and then never stopped because editors said, Send lots of these. I was fired up. I always wrote by hand, because I found it was quicker. I think my schoolmaster’s family taught me to sit down at a desk and, you know, work. I always tried to publish, and I always got things published. Everyone said, That’s a very bad sign, no one gets things published just when they want to. But I wasn’t young, and I’d never wanted to do anything else.
RIP. May she be read.
One of the best. I never read a book or a story by Jane Gardam that I didn’t love. Your piece does her much justice. May she be read, indeed.
I lived in the same small street as Jane Gardam and her husband for a few years, and perhaps it was typical of such a non-showy, sensitive author that many neighbours didn't know who she was, and those who did never made a fuss. A brilliant writer.