Sally Beauman
Novelist Born: July 25, 1944; Died: July 7, 2016
SALLY Beauman, who has died aged 71, was a writer whose first novel, Destiny, combines intelligent prose with a page-turning romantic plot – a formula that led to a hugely successful career.
One of her other successful novels was a companion book to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which took up the story some 20 years after the original and tried to change our perspective on the infamous first wife of Max de Winter. Rebecca’s Tale, which was published in 2001, was not popular with all the critics but it was Beauman’s way of paying tribute to a book she loved. It was, she said, not a book about love at all but exactly the opposite. It was an anti-romance.
Beauman started her career as a journalist. Born Sally Vanessa Kinsey-Miles in Devon, she studied English literature at Cambridge and moved to the United States after meeting and marrying economist Christopher Beauman. While there, she worked for New York magazine before moving to London to take up the editorship of Queen magazine.
She then worked as a freelancer, contributing to Vogue and many newspapers and it was while working for The Daily Telegraph that she interviewed the actor Alan Howard and began a relationship with him. They later married and worked together on restoring the Barra home of Howard’s uncle, the writer Compton Mackenzie.
The idea for her first novel, Destiny, came in the 1980s, the story of the romance between a French aristocrat, Edouard de Chavigny, and a young Englishwoman, Helene Craig. It was reported she received a £1 million advance for it in 1985 – at the time the largest ever for a first novel.
After its success, Beauman had the freedom to write what she wanted and seven other novels followed, starting with Dark Angel in 1990, which explored child abuse, followed by a trilogy of romantic novels: Lovers and Liars, Danger Zones and Sextet.
Rebecca’s Tale appeared in 2001 and came from Beauman’s obsession with the original 1938 classic. She had written about du Maurier for the New Yorker magazine in the 1990s and became fascinated by her and her work. She then began to imagine what it would be like to hear the story of the events at Manderley, not from the perspective of de Winter’s mousy second wife but from Rebecca herself.
After meeting du Maurier’s son Christian at a literary event, she began writing the novel and was determined to change people’s views of the character and the novel. Rebecca was, she said, “an anti-romance – a clever, cunning and subversive attack on the very genre to which it would be consigned.
Yet at the time of publication, that aspect of the novel was ignored, and the novel’s ambivalences remain relatively uninvestigated to this day. Why? It was when I first began to ask myself that question that the seeds of my own Rebecca’s Tale were sown.”
Two further novels followed: The Landscape of Love in 2005 and two years ago The Visitors, which recreated the dig that uncovered Tutankhamun’s tomb. She also wrote two works of non-fiction: The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Centenary Production of Henry V and The Royal Shakespeare Company: A History of Ten Decades.
Ursula Mackenzie, head of Beauman’s publishers Little Brown, said Beauman’s skill had been to combine great storytelling, intricate characterisation and a sense of history and place.
“For a popular novelist, she explored complex themes and the darker reaches of the human psyche – one of the reasons she was the perfect choice to write the companion novel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, as they shared many of each other’s qualities as writers,” she said.
“Her final novel, The Visitors, set largely in Egypt at the time of the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, was critically acclaimed and probably her finest work.”
In recent years, Beauman had been caring for her husband, who died last year. She is survived by her son.