Helen Dunmore
Poet who embarked on a new career in her forties as a fine historical novelist and children’s writer
HELEN DUNMORE, who has died aged 64, was a prolific and versatile writer who earned her reputation as one of Britain’s finest historical novelists by evoking the lives of ordinary people whose thoughts and feelings are lost in the generalisations of conventional works of history.
Her masterpiece was often thought to be The Siege (2001), which examines the Siege of Leningrad by focusing on the privations and indignities endured by one Russian family. The Betrayal (2010), a sequel that showed some of the same characters faring little better in the dying days of Stalin’s rule, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
She had the distinction of being the first winner of the Orange Prize (now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) with her novel A Spell in Winter (1995), a Gothic tale set on the eve of the First World War in which a teenage brother and sister abandoned by their parents, and isolated in their grandfather’s crumbling mansion, experiment with incest.
Helen Dunmore had been a well-regarded poet for some years by the time she published her first novel in her forties, and thereafter flourished in both verse and prose, being acclaimed for her many short stories and children’s books as well as her novels. Her books benefited from a sharp rise in the critical prestige of historical fiction in the early 1990s, brought about by the success of Sebastian Faulks, Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel.
Helen Dunmore would never have written a novel about an Emperor Claudius or a Thomas Cromwell, however, although that might have won her more attention. Her focus was the people crushed by history, “without power or any sense of control over these huge events”.
And yet, she liked to emphasise, such people did unwittingly shape the course of history. Using the citizens of Leningrad as an example, she declared that “their actions and their very survival transformed history by contributing to the endurance of the city and to the turning of the tide against invading German forces.”
In The Siege she managed to combine a moving love story with a convincing account of the changes that fear and starvation effect on her characters. “Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade,” reflects her heroine Anna. “Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy.”
When the Observer’s reviewer complained that the novel’s “mum’s eye view” of the blockade’s effect on one household was “less Tolstoyan than suburban”, Helen Dunmore retorted: “One of the great novelists of the domestic interior is John Updike. It’s only when women do it that it’s patronised.”
One of her principal gifts was the ability to convey sensory experiences, so that whatever era her characters lived in, her readers could understand what it felt like to wear their clothes, what the streets they walked in smelt like, what physical effects love or despair wrought.
She wrote particularly well about eating, saying that “to write of food with love is the most innocent of pornographies”. One of her early poems, “Wild Strawberries” (“they’re so quickly over,/pulpless, sliding to juice,/a grainy rub on the tongue/and the taste’s gone”) became a ubiquitous presence in foodie anthologies, but she used this talent to grim effect when she gave readers of The Siege a taste of what it felt like to have to sate one’s hunger with boiled shoe leather and wallpaper paste.
Helen Dunmore was always careful to convey the ways in which people in the past thought differently and perhaps lived more richly. When The Daily Telegraph’s Jane Shilling accused her of heaping Hardyesque misery on the young First World War veteran who is the hero of The Lie (2014), she responded that he “didn’t live in a time when the narratives were that you have to have closure and move on. He hasn’t led an anaesthetised life. He has felt, he has loved, he has created very strong bonds.”
When she was told she had cancer she took the long view, observing that few people throughout history had been lucky enough to live into their mid-sixties in good health, and deprecated the modern “sense of thwarted entitlement” induced by the prospect of death.
She celebrated her good luck in living in the 21st century in one of her best-known poems, “Glad of These Times”: “I am not hungry, I do not curtsey/i lock my door with my own key/and I am glad of these times.” But she regarded her novels as acts of homage to those who had suffered in the past. The special quality of the historical novel, she felt, was that it could “set ghosts walking and talking”.
Helen Dunmore was born in Beverley, East Yorkshire, on December 12 1952, the second of four children of Maurice Dunmore and his wife Betty (née Smith). Her father’s job as an industrial manager meant that the family frequently had to move around the country, making Helen an observer, “always coming into situations from the outside”. Her mother was a fine storyteller, and her father would recite TS Eliot to her when she was still small.
She read English at the University of York and then taught for two years in Finland, the icy landscape of which she would memorably evoke in her novel House of Orphans (2006), set during the Finnish uprising against Russian control in the first years of the 20th century.
On her return to England she went to live in Bristol because a friend had a spare room, and remained in the city for the rest of her life. Later on she also kept a house by the sea in Cornwall.
For many years she scratched a living as a poet. Her verse, like her prose, was smooth and unflashy, and as in her novels she would often create a solid sense of ordinary life before introducing a note of danger. She published 10 collections of poetry and in 2010 her poem “The Malarkey” won the National Poetry Competition.
She made several abortive attempts at writing novels but found “a barrier between me and the words”. Eventually, success with short stories boosted her confidence and she published her first novel, Zennor in Darkness, in 1993. It dramatised the true story of DH Lawrence and his German wife Frieda coming under suspicion of spying when they lived in Cornwall during the First World War, and received the Mckitterick prize.
For some time thereafter she produced novels at the rate of one a year; among the best of them are Talking To the Dead (1996), a contemporary tale of two sisters unhealthily bound together by a shared secret about the death of their baby brother decades earlier; Mourning Ruby (2003), a slantwise portrayal of a mother’s grief for her dead daughter; and Exposure (2016), a Cold War spy story. Bringing the poet Catullus to life in Counting the Stars (2008) proved beyond her, however.
Her many volumes for children ranged from picture books to collections of verse; most admired was her series set in Ingo, an underwater world inhabited by Merfolk off the Cornish coast.
Helen Dunmore was politely reticent about her personal life. One interviewer noted that when asked straightforward questions about whether her parents were affluent or religious, she would simply reply that the answers would be too complicated. She shed no light on why she wrote so often about abandoned children or people thrust unexpectedly into the role of surrogate parent.
However, she was warm and friendly, with a keen sense of humour; her joint favourite novel, along with War and Peace, was Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. She was a striking-looking woman who remained slim and youthful in appearance. Her writing routine began with a mile’s walk every day from her home to her office.
Helen Dunmore was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1997 and held honorary doctorates from the Universities of Glamorgan and Exeter. She was Chairman of the Society of Authors in 2005-6.
She married, in 1980, Frank Charnley, a lawyer; he survives her with a daughter, a son and a stepson.