Lynne Reid Banks, 94; wrote ‘The Indian in the Cupboard’

Lynne Reid Banks, a versatile British author who began her writing career with the bestselling feminist novel “The L-Shaped Room” but found her biggest success with the popular children’s book “The Indian in the Cupboard,” died on Thursday in Surrey, England. She was 94.

Her death, at a care facility, was caused by cancer, said James Wills, her literary agent.

Ms. Banks was part of a generation of writers, including Shelagh Delaney and Margaret Drabble, that emerged in postwar Britain and whose books explored the struggles of young women seeking personal and financial independence, in sharp contrast to the contemporaneous “angry young men” literary movement defined by John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.

Over her long career, Ms. Banks’s character portrayals were often called insensitive and her language offensive, particularly in her two best-known works. She was a complicated, sometimes contradictory figure who became increasingly unrepentant about her firmly held opinions.

“The L-Shaped Room” (1960), lauded by critics as a secondwave feminist novel, tells the story of an unmarried secretary whose conservative, middle-class father throws her out of their home when she tells him she’s pregnant. Rather than reach out to the father of the child, she rents a small, L-shaped room at the top of a rooming house in London and becomes part of an improvised family of fellow boarders, including a Caribbeanborn jazz musician. Class, race, sexism, and the danger of illegal abortions are central to the plot.

The novel became an immediate bestseller in Britain and was made into a film, released in the United States in 1963 and starring Leslie Caron, who was nominated for an Oscar for best actress.

After “The Indian in the Cupboard” was published in 1980, The New York Times hailed it as the best novel of the year for children. Ms. Banks wrote four sequels.

The first book in the series begins when a boy, Omri, is given an old medicine cabinet with magical properties: When he places plastic action figures inside, they come alive. The first toy he brings to life is a Native American named Little Bear — the “Indian” of the title. One of Omri’s friends places his toy cowboy in the cabinet, and a wellworn conflict is set in motion.

Although the purported message to young readers was the importance of tolerance and respect for other cultures, Ms. Banks was later accused of perpetuating stereotypes. (Little Bear speaks in a dialect of broken English, and the cowboy is a laconic man who likes his whiskey.)

By the fourth book, “The Mystery of the Cupboard” (1993), critics had grown impatient with the clichéd characters that would step out of the magic cupboard. “Through its innocent-looking mirrored door march a succession of plucky, albeit creaky cultural stereotypes, ever predictable and true to the dictates of their sex, ethnic group or time,” fiction writer Michael Dorris wrote in The New York Times Book Review.

The American Indian Library Association in 1991 listed “The Indian in the Cupboard” series among the “titles to avoid,” and a school board in British Columbia temporarily removed the first book from its libraries in 1992, citing “offensive treatment of native peoples.”

Still, the series remained popular, and “The Indian in the Cupboard” was adapted into a 1995 film directed by Frank Oz.

Lynne Reid Banks was born in London on July 31, 1929. She was the only child of James and Muriel (Reid) Banks. Her father, who was Scottish, was a doctor; her mother, who was Irish and known as Pat, was an actress.

As a child during World War II, Lynne was evacuated with her mother to Canada, where they settled in Saskatchewan. It was a mostly happy time, and the human cost of the war became clear only when she returned to London at 15.

“I found my city in ruins,” she said in an interview for the reference work “Authors and Artists for Young Adults.” When she learned about the wartime hardships that the rest of her family had endured, she was horrified and ashamed. “I felt like a deserter,” she said.

In 1955, she became one of the first female television reporters in England, working for Independent Television News (later ITV). One day, she was asked to try out a new kind of typewriter in the newsroom. One sentence led to another, and she realized that she was writing in the voice of a woman who was pregnant, unmarried, and on her own. These random first sentences became the seeds of “The L-shaped Room.”

The success of the novel gave her the freedom to write fulltime, and she quit her television job. But her life took another turn when she met and married Chaim Stephenson, a sculptor, and moved to Israel to join him on a kibbutz.

The move led her mother to accuse her of wasting her talent and placing herself in a dangerous and “soul-stunting” situation, Ms. Banks wrote in The Guardian in 2017. But she loved her adopted country, and she taught English and continued to write while raising three sons, until the family moved back to England in 1971.

She leaves three sons, Adiel, Gillon, and Omri Stephenson, and three grandchildren. Her husband died in 2016.