Novelist who had a bestseller with The L-Shaped Room
Lynne Reid Banks, who has died aged 94, caught the social-realist zeitgeist with her debut novel, The L-Shaped Room. Written in the late 1950s, it tells the story of a young middleclass woman who falls pregnant as a result of a casual encounter. Cast out by her family, she ends up living in a run-down boarding house in a west London backstreet, along with several prostitutes, a gay black man and a Jewish writer who becomes her lover. She described the novel as “nothing spectacular”, said The Daily Telegraph, but its frank discussion of previously taboo subjects delighted the critics (“She can suggest all the indignity of being sick in the Tube in half a sentence,” enthused one). The book became a bestseller, and was turned into a Bryan Forbes film that won its star, Leslie Caron, an Oscar nomination. None of her other books for adults matched its success, but she later wrote some well-loved children’s books, including The Indian in the Cupboard (1980).
Lynne Reid Banks was born in Barnes, west London, in 1929 and was evacuated with her mother during the War to Canada. On her return, she attended Rada and started acting in rep. It was during this period that she crossed paths with John Osborne, said The Guardian. They did not get on, and his letters suggest that he used her as the model for one of the characters in his own early success, Look Back in Anger. Combative and forthright, she described her acting career as a failure, and started working as a freelance writer instead, before talking her way into a job at ITN. Thus, in 1955, she became one of the first two female news reporters on British TV. She interviewed Charlie Chaplin, Rita Hayworth and Agatha Christie, among others, while writing her first novel in her spare time.
The book’s success took her by surprise, but she wasn’t happy about the way Forbes changed the story for the film, and she resented the assumption she was herself a single mother, writing about her own experiences, rather than using her imagination. By the early 1960s, she had met the Liverpool-born Israeli sculptor Chaim Stephenson, her future husband, and together they emigrated to Israel. They settled on a kibbutz near the Sea of Galilee, where their three sons were born, and where she taught English. Eventually, she started to miss England, and they moved back in the 1970s. Over the next four decades she wrote several more novels, a biography of the Brontës and numerous children’s books. Her sons survive her.