Penelope Hoare
Award-winning editor whose authors included Rose Tremain, Peter Ackroyd and Jane Gardam
PENELOPE HOARE, who has died aged 77, was for 50 years one of the most gifted, and self-effacing, editors in British publishing; her sympathetic vision, intelligence and wit were greatly appreciated by her authors – who included Rose Tremain, Jane Gardam, Peter Ackroyd, David Starkey, Richard Mabey and Gillian Tindall.
Penny Hoare’s career was shaped by the implosion of the British publishing industry, as a long succession of proud independent houses were sucked in by larger corporate structures. She was one of a dwindling breed of editors who resisted this tendency and whose authors followed them wherever they went.
Rose Tremain recalled that Penny Hoare had published her first novel after its rejection by six other publishers and that their collaboration had lasted through 13 novels since 1976. She recalled Penny’s “patience, her erudition, her humour… She always understood how things could be sharper, funnier, more concise, and how echoes and images could be placed and picked up.”
Penelope Susan Hoare was born on January 12 1940 in the Nilgiri Hills in southern India, where her father was a tea planter, and grew up amid the forest monkeys, elephants and tigers of the Western Ghats. Her father, Michael Hoare, had fled his expected destiny as a director of the family bank. Her mother Susan (née Rennie) whose “black hair and blue eyes” were admired by the novelist TH White, had also fled England as a young woman, pursued by several unsuitable young men. After marriage and settling in India in 1935, the Hoares raised their four children on the Chamraj tea estate, a remote location that resulted in the creation of a close-knit family.
The children’s education was entrusted to a governess, Miss Webb, who brought them on to a far higher standard than that of their contemporaries, as they discovered when they finally attended school. Penny survived an early misadventure at the age of two when her older sister pushed her out of the family Jeep, and failed to mention it for several miles.
After the war the idyll ended and in 1953, at the age of 13, Penny was sent to Greycotes School, north Oxford. The area was a residential quarter for academics, but Greycotes was not an academic school.
None the less, in 1958 she won an open scholarship to read Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall. She was the first pupil from her school to go to any university and when the news broke the incredulous headmistress awarded the pupils a whole day’s holiday in celebration. After leaving Oxford she got a job at Queen magazine where she was the art critic, her remit including music and opera as well as reviews of restaurants, to which she would arrive with her small terrier. If the dog was not admitted, the restaurant did not get a review.
Her love of dogs lasted for the rest of her life and at least one of her authors found that pages of the meticulously edited typescript had been decorated with muddy paw marks.
Ten years later she became editorial director of Hamish Hamilton, then celebrated for its upmarket list, which included both Camus and Sartre, as well as Georges Simenon, JD Salinger, Raymond Chandler and Truman Capote. In due course the firm became part of the Penguin Group but in 1989 its managing director, Christopher Sinclair-stevenson, left to found his own company and Penny Hoare was among the key staff members he took with him.
As editorial director and rights director of Sinclair-stevenson she was determined to prove that small independents had a future. But within four years Sinclair-stevenson had become part of Reed, and Reed swiftly became part of Random House. In 1997 she became deputy publishing director of Chatto and Windus, a division of Random House. In 2005 she was awarded the Kim Scott Walwyn Award for women in publishing and she was voted Editor of the Year in 2007.
Penny Hoare lived with her beloved friend, the publisher Patricia Parkin, in a cottage in the garden of Cowdrays, East Hendred, her younger sister Margaret’s house in south Oxfordshire. There Penny and Patricia, until the latter’s death in 2009, kept open house for Penny’s 19 nephews, nieces and great-nieces of all ages and sizes. They found their aunt to be funny and generous, with a contagious laugh, always ready for a game of racing demon or even a glass of gin. Her devotion to Anglican Christianity and her knowledge of the Bible made her a scholarly guide to the art galleries of Amsterdam, Paris and Venice.
Penny Hoare founded and launched the Michael Hoare Memorial Fund, which pays for schooling in both Tamil and English for the tea workers of the Western Ghats.