Felicity Bryan
Remarkable agent who was a guiding spirit behind writers from Lucy Worsley to Edmund de Waal
FELICITY BRYAN, who has died aged 74, was a literary agent who tended her authors with as much care as she gave the sensitive plants in her Oxfordshire garden, the setting in which most people picture her, as pretty as a Kate Greenaway nursery-rhyme illustration. As one caustic female novelist observed: “Felicity always looks as if she is just about to make a daisy chain.”
This was unwittingly accurate. In The Town Gardener’s Companion, the 1981 book based on her Evening Standard columns, Felicity Bryan mentioned her affection for daisies, recalling her childhood home in Yorkshire: “I remember our front lawn not just as a source of endless daisy chains but also as the home of hosts of intoxicating tiny flowers.”
But the image, the elfin frame, the felicitous Christian name, the fêtes champêtres she held every summer, all represented the triumph of her strong character over successive personal tragedies, in the face of which her exuberance never abated.
Felicity Anne Bryan was born on October 16 1945, second of three daughters of Col (later Sir) Paul Bryan, DSO, MC, vice-chairman of the Tory party and MP for Howden in the East Riding, and his wife Betty (née Hoyle).
The Bryan girls enjoyed the blessings of an idyllic childhood in a farmhouse – bantams, piglets and orphaned lambs in the kitchen – high on the edge of the North York moors. They rode ponies over the moors on picnics, swam and went boating on their grandparents’ lake.
This idyll was punctured when their mother, hitherto a whirl of creative energy, became severely depressed with bipolar disorder and “eight years of hell” ensued. She drowned in a hotel pool near Marbella when Felicity was 22.
Years later, the eldest sister Dr Libby Bryan, paediatrician and creator of the Twins and Multiple Births Foundation, discovered from doctor cousins that the family was riddled with cancer: the Bryan girls all carried the malignant BRCA1 gene.
When the youngest sister, Bunny, died of ovarian cancer weeks after her ordination as a Church of England vicar, aged 42, the elder sisters both underwent surgery to avert the disease. Libby wrote a book, Singing the Life, about life under threat, and died of pancreatic cancer just after finishing it in 2008. In recent years, Felicity Bryan would tell people with acceptance: “I’ve had cancer three times, and I will die of it.”
After her school-days at Benenden, where her sister was head girl, Felicity had had little idea of what to do other than finishing school in Paris, a coming-out dance in Yorkshire, a summer in Florence. She took a BA in art history at the Courtauld Institute, where she was taught by Sir Anthony Blunt, but found working on the Burlington Magazine dull.
In 1967 she hit America by Greyhound bus and “it was truly love at first sight.” The following year, seeking “a career that’s a way of life”, she offered herself as assistant for election year to British correspondents in Washington: Joe Rogaly of the Financial Times responded.
She arrived there between the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.
In Washington she bonded with a circle of international journalists, including David Watt, Anthony Howard, Henry Fairlie, Peter Jay, and Stanley Johnson of the World Bank. She watched the moon landing with Andrew Knight. She became romantically involved with the legendary Washington Post journalist Laurence (Larry) Stern, Brooklynborn, formerly married buddy of Ben Bradlee.
She accompanied Stern to Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Haiti, and he wanted to marry her. But she could not see herself as a Washington wife, and retreated to The Economist in London.
Stern dropped dead, aged 50, while jogging on Martha’s Vineyard, in 1979. “His death was a watershed for me,” Felicity Bryan wrote. With Bradlee and the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson, she helped to set up the Stern Fellowships, to give a promising British journalist a summer placement on the Post. Among early beneficiaries were James Naughtie from The Scotsman, and Lionel Barber, who went on to edit the Financial Times.
When Felicity Bryan switched careers to be a literary agent, Naughtie became one of her devoted writers with his first book, The Rivals, about Blair vs Brown.
The agency she joined in 1973 was Curtis Brown, whose chief, Graham Watson, was her next mentor. (He vetoed her commissioning Anthony Blunt: “I lived through the war. Curtis Brown will not make money out of traitors.”) She struck lucky when a rival agent, Diana Crawfurd, went on maternity leave and asked her to “look after John Julius”. Lord Norwich, then writing his magnum opus on Venice, poured champagne at Blomfield Road, and they hit it off at once.
John Julius, Felicity Bryan said in her eulogy at his memorial last year, was her ideal author, “never happier than when cycling off for another
Alice became psychotic; she dropped out of school and attempted suicide several times, once jumping off the roof of the house and breaking her back in three places. She had inherited her grandmother’s bipolar disorder. And in 2004, when at Glasgow art school, she succeeded in taking her own life, at 22.
In 2006 Felicity Bryan wrote a Guardian essay, “Once we had a daughter”, totally frank about her experiences with her mother and her daughter. “Thank goodness for my work, my colleagues, my clients, my friends and my sleeping pills,” she wrote.
She cooked, she went to the ballet, she endlessly travelled, scorning first-class (“I’m so small I can curl up anywhere.”) Her authors, among them Karen Armstrong, Desmond Morris, Gerald Durrell, Miriam Stoppard, Mary Berry, the re-launched Rosamunde Pilcher – appreciated her broad hinterland: she was an ideal confidante. “And whenever you needed her,” said the biographer Artemis Cooper, “her entire world was dropped so she could see you through.”
Sir Roy Strong acknowledged her encouragement. She recalled sitting in Sir Roy’s office in the V&A in 1987 when he told her he was retiring – “and from now on I am relying on you for my income.” She duly made many deals for him, including the sale of his scurrilous and wildly successful diaries.
She had a canny understanding of which publishers and editors to approach, how to make academics write lucidly about their research. The historian Lucy Worsley – who regarded Bryan as “a jumping bean, leaping up to talk to people as if on springs” was thrilled to become a Faber author with her first book, Cavalier.
Felicity Bryan’s repeated assurances were: “There’s a place for this book and I’m bloody well going to find it.” This was the case with one of her biggest global bestsellers, The Hare with Amber Eyes, in 2010.
The ceramicist Edmund de Waal already knew the Bryan family when he embarked upon the story of his family’s escape from Nazi Germany and the survival of a fabulous collection of Japanese netsuke. He sent Felicity a chapter which, he agreed, was terrible.
“My dear,” she said, “this simply won’t do. But I will be your agent, and we will make it happen.” She became his mentor and friend. “What I valued,” he said, “was that she listened for what rings true in a book. She completely believed in The Hare with Amber Eyes, but knew how hard I would have to work on it. That’s why she was so sui generis, respected and loved.”
Her decision to tell people about her terminal cancer enabled her to receive their valedictory messages, using her last weeks to promote her authors, with round-robin emails to replace the cancelled launch parties. She had “shoe-horned” – her words – at least three titles into the bestseller lists: Putin’s People by Catherine Belton; The Well Gardened Mind by Sue Stuartsmith; and James Naughtie’s On the Road.
Two weeks before her death, she was gratified to learn that the Washington Post re-named their Stern fellowships the Stern-bryan fellowships. And just last week, in the company of her husband and sons Maxim and Benjamin, she was invested MBE by the Lord-lieutenant of Oxfordshire, in her garden at home, wearing a fresh, garden-picked flower fascinator in her hair.