Author and biographer;
Elizabeth Osborne Mavor, who died last month aged 85, was an author and biographer whose work focused primarily on relationships between women. While her 1973 novel, A Green Equinox, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, she is possibly better known for her non-fiction work concerning ‘The Ladies of Llangollen’, a famous pair of 18th century Irish gentlewomen who, against all social conventions of the time, lived together in a cottage in Wales.
Mavor’s father was the well-to-do director of the Glasgow mine engineering company Mavor and Coulson. Initially raised by a succession of nannies and governesses, she attended the prestigious St Leonards School in St Andrews, an institution founded in the belief that “a girl should receive an education that is as good as her brother’s, if not better”. Mavor’s education continued within St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she read modern history when not contributing to (and ultimately editing) the independent student newspaper Cherwell.
Following her graduation in 1950, she began working for the British paperback-format short story magazine Argosy, as well as writing newspaper reviews and her own fiction. She married the illustrator and cartoonist Haro Hodson in 1953, settling in the market town of Watlington, Oxfordshire. They had two sons: Peregrine, now himself a writer, and Toby, an artist.
Her first novel, Summer in the Greenhouse, was not published until 1959, but in its exploration of an older woman’s lyrical reminiscence of a youthful affair, clearly indicated Mavor’s interest in exploring women’s emotions. The Temple of Flora, published two years later, focused on a woman who ultimately renounces a married lover. The Redoubt, published in 1967, used a variety of first and third-person narratives to contrast two unhappy young marriages with the contented union of an older couple during the 1953 East Coast floods. In A Green Equinox (which lost out to J G Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur in that year’s Booker Prize), Mavor’s heroine embarked on an affair with the married owner of a grand country estate, but ultimately formed deeper relationships with his wife and mother.
Throughout her writing career Mavor was clearly intrigued by women who flouted convention, such as the 18th century Mary Read—the inspiration for her final novel, 1988’s The White Solitaire—who lived as a man during her career as soldier and sailor-turned-pirate. Mavor also edited the American journals of the 19th century actress Fanny Kemble, and Irish traveller and diarist Katherine Wilmot. Subjects of her biographies included Elizabeth Chudleigh, a pretty country maid who charmed the royal houses of Europe and became Duchess of Kingston.
She was particularly attracted to the “romantic friendship” of Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, who fled their native Ireland in 1778 and set up home together in a modest, slate-roofed cottage in the north Wales village of Llangollen. Until their deaths in (respectively) 1829 and 1831, the two women spent their days together, gardening and reading, writing journals and letters. While the pair kept their hair short and dressed like men, Mavor was by no means convinced that they were lesbians, at least in the modern sense of the word. She maintained that theirs was a perfect union of souls—and no more.
Mavor is survived by her husband, their sons and their families.
Originally published by The Herald, 12 June 2013.
