Isabel Quigly
Hard-working critic and translator who had enjoyed acclaim early on with a self-revealing novel
ISABEL QUIGLY, the writer who has died aged 91, sustained a successful career for four decades in the competitive and often cut-throat literary world of London, supporting herself and the son she brought up as a single parent. She knew everyone and everyone knew her. Remarkably in such circles, no one ever had a bad word to say about her, in part because she always cast herself as a kindly, slightly dotty, unthreatening spinster aunt. She willingly mentored younger writers, and tenderly cared for those bedbound at the end of their lives. (She would visit the dying author Antonia White each Sunday to read to her.)
But that was only one part of Isabel Quigly’s story, an outward impression that belied her own considerable but lightly worn talents and achievements – as a novelist, film critic, literary editor and translator of more than 100 books from Italian, French and Spanish. Professional success came early when, in 1953, she published a novel, The Eye of Heaven, to widespread critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic (it was renamed The Exchange of Joy in the US).
Like many first novels, it was highly autobiographical: it was based on Isabel Quigly’s impulsive and ultimately ill-fated marriage to Raffaello Salimbeni, an impoverished but aristocratic sculptor she had fallen for when in Florence.
The book attracted a lot of publicity. “I cannot remember a novel in which the impact of total love has been more faithfully set down,” wrote Leonard Strong in The Spectator. But Isabel Quigly did not enjoy the experience of laying bare her own life in fiction, and The Eye of Heaven was to be her only novel.
Thereafter, as she struggled to make ends meet, bring up her son Crispin and support their life in rural Sussex, she turned instead to journalism and to translating other writers’ work. For a decade from 1956, she was the film critic of The Spectator, only stepping down because she said being in a cinema gave her headaches.
The real reason was that she needed glasses but was too vain to wear them. Later, after she had succumbed to a visit to the opticians, she would always have her specs either on a chain round her neck or propped up on top of her unruly hair, which usually proved more than a match for half-attached clips.
Her dress sense was similarly eccentric – colleagues remember in particular her padding round offices they shared in (holey) stockinged feet, “benignly passing from one person to the next with a word of encouragement or interest for everyone”.
Those who sat with her over the years on the judging panels of a wide range of literary prizes (the Betty Trask, Heinemann, Winifred Holtby, Somerset Maugham and Time Life Awards among them, as well the 1986 Booker jury) came to know a different Isabel Quigly, though – sharp, clever and steely. So too did the literary editors who used her regularly as a reviewer.
Again she played up the image of belonging to another age, with her closely typed reviews filling every inch of the sheet of paper, and her corrections added in a spidery hand, but her copy was always delivered on deadline, at the requested length and to the point. The other-worldly Quigly was, underneath it all, practical and professional. She was never fussy about which books she would review or papers she would write for – a commission was a commission and she needed the money. She claimed to be able to read a “lightweight thriller or detective novel” in “around 30 minutes”, while a more substantial work would take her only “a matter of hours”.
While never cruel in her judgments, Quigly would not hand out plaudits unless they were fully deserved. And she was never afraid to go against the consensus. The year she judged the Booker, the panel was said in leaked reports to be divided between Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone and Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. In the resulting standoff, it is said, Quigly was no pushover.
Some critics occasionally found her writing tone “schoolmarmish”. That, at least, was the verdict of Angus Wilson reviewing in The Observer her otherwise “fascinating” 1982 study of the English school story, The Heirs of Tom Brown, which shrewdly analysed the place of boarding schools in Victorian society, with their bullying, repressed love affairs, snobbery and games-obsessed philistinism. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Arthur Marshall concluded that her book was “a triumph of research”, but she had “found all too little time for humour and fun”.
Her own output was small over all her active years compared with the number of works she translated into English. Italian was her favoured language and her rendition of Silvano Ceccherini’s The Transfer won the John Florio Prize in 1967, two years after her version of Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-continis had been the runner-up. For decades she was the go-to translator of Italian works for the English market. A rare slip-up came when, in 1983, she passed on Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.
Isabel Quigly was born on September 17 1926 in Ontaneda, near Santander in Spain. Her father, Richard, was a railway engineer and she had an older sister, Clarice (named after their mother), who was always known as Cita. Isabel’s parents had intended her to be called Elizabeth and that was the name she was registered under with British authorities. The Catholic priest in their Spanish village who baptised her insisted on Isabel.
Aged five, she was sent to board at the exclusive Assumption Convent in Kensington Square in London, accompanied by her beloved Spanish nanny, Tuki. Two years later, the material comforts of her life up to that point disappeared overnight when her father was ruined financially. The nuns kept Isabel and Cita on at the convent without charging – though they were made to feel socially inferior because of it. Tuki, however, had to leave – the most traumatic parting of her life, Isabel Quigly would later reflect. The bond remained, however, and in 1960 Tuki – by then working with a rich American family – lent her former charge the money to buy a house in London.
During the war years, the Quigly sisters were evacuated with about 50 other girls and the nuns to Aldenham Park in Shropshire, seat of the Acton family, where Monsignor Ronald Knox was working on his translation of the Bible. From there Isabel moved first to Godolphin School, Salisbury, and then, having won scholarships from five different bodies, she went up to Newnham College, Cambridge. She took a First in English and was one of the first cohort of women to receive a full degree.
After graduation she worked for the Red Cross in Geneva and then at Penguin in its early days, before meeting Salimbeni in 1953. She had gone to Florence to say goodbye to Cita, who had married an Italian doctor and settled there. Isabel Quigly’s next destination was to be Johannesburg, where she had a fiancé and a job as a university lecturer waiting. But she was swept off her feet by Salimbeni and married him instead.
They parted soon after Crispin’s birth. She never allowed her son to see his father and could never herself return to Florence again. The story of her failed marriage was not one she liked to talk about, even with close friends.
Back in England, mother and son developed a close bond. When he was an undergraduate in Cambridge, she used an inheritance to buy two dilapidated properties there and subsequently worked with him on the renovations. They were later to do the same with a property in south-west London that became her base in the city. Finally she had someone with whom to share the financial burden.
In 1986, she began an 11-year stint as literary editor of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly, persuading her wide circle of bookish “names” to review for tiny fees. Her great friend, the poet Kathleen Raine, praised Isabel Quigly’s books’ pages as “keeping up the old standards”.
She sat on many boards, including the Arts Council’s Literature Panel, PEN, the Society of Authors and the Translators’ Association, and in 2000 wrote the official history of the Royal Society of Literature.
Her later years were enlivened by her three grandsons, Hugh, Guy and George, who survive her, along with her son.