Lynne Reid Banks, a flexible British writer who started her writing profession with the best-selling feminist novel “The L-Shaped Room” however discovered her greatest success with the favored youngsters’s e book “The Indian in the Cupboard,” died on Thursday in Surrey, England. She was 94.
Her demise, at a care facility, was brought on by most cancers, mentioned James Wills, her literary agent.
Ms. Banks was a part of a technology of writers, together with Shelagh Delaney and Margaret Drabble, that emerged in postwar Britain and whose books explored the struggles of younger ladies in search of private and monetary independence, in sharp distinction to the contemporaneous “angry young men” literary motion outlined by John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.
Over Ms. Banks’s lengthy profession, her character portrayals have been usually known as insensitive and her language offensive, notably in her two best-known works. An advanced, typically contradictory determine, she grew to become more and more unrepentant about her firmly held opinions.
“The L-Shaped Room” (1960), lauded by critics as a second-wave feminist novel, tells the story of an single secretary whose conservative, middle-class father throws her out of their house when she tells him she’s pregnant. Rather than attain out to the daddy of the kid, she rents a small L-shaped room on the prime of a rooming home in London and turns into a part of an improvised household of fellow boarders, together with a Caribbean-born jazz musician. Class, race, sexism and the hazard of unlawful abortions are all central to the plot.
Ms. Banks didn’t contemplate herself a feminist when she wrote the e book; as a younger lady coming of age within the Fifties, she mentioned, she thought that males have been superior.
But she quickly modified her thoughts. “What a joke,” she informed the BBC program “Bookclub” in 2010. “I mean, I don’t believe that anymore. I think women are infinitely the superior sex and that men are probably the most dangerous creatures on the planet.”
Ms. Banks got here to remorse the racial tropes utilized in her portrayal of the Caribbean housemate in “The L-Shaped Room,” acknowledging that racism had permeated her narrative. “The prejudices existed, and they came out in this book, and it’s shame-making, but there they were,” she informed the BBC. “They were absolutely part of the atmosphere.”
The novel grew to become a direct greatest vendor in Britain and was made into a movie, launched within the United States in 1963, which starred Leslie Caron, who was nominated for an Oscar for greatest actress.
After “The Indian in the Cupboard” was revealed in 1980, The New York Times hailed it as the very best novel of the yr for kids. Ms. Banks wrote 4 sequels.
The first e book within the sequence begins when a boy, Omri, is given an outdated drugs cupboard with magical properties: When he locations plastic motion figures inside, they arrive alive. The first toy he brings to life is a Native American named Little Bear — the “Indian” of the title. One of Omri’s pals locations his toy cowboy within the cupboard, and a well-worn battle is about in movement.
Although the purported message to younger readers was the significance of tolerance and respect for different cultures, Ms. Banks was later accused of perpetuating stereotypes. (Little Bear speaks in a dialect of damaged English, and the cowboy is a laconic man who likes his whiskey.)
By the fourth e book, “The Mystery of the Cupboard” (1993), critics had grown impatient with the clichéd characters that may step out of the magic cabinet. “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,” the fiction author Michael Dorris wrote in The New York Times Book Review.
The American Indian Library Association in 1991 listed “The Indian in the Cupboard” sequence among the many “titles to avoid,” and a college board in British Columbia quickly eliminated the primary e book from its libraries in 1992, citing “offensive treatment of native peoples.”
Still, the sequence remained common, and “The Indian in the Cupboard” was tailored right into a 1995 movie directed by Frank Oz.
Lynne Reid Banks was born in London on July 31, 1929. She was the one baby of James and Muriel (Reid) Banks. Her father, who was Scottish, was a physician; her mom, often called Pat, who was Irish, was an actress.
As a toddler throughout World War II, Lynne was evacuated along with her mom to Canada, the place they settled in Saskatchewan. It was a largely joyful time, and the human value of the struggle grew to become clear solely when she returned to London at 15.
“I found my city in ruins,” she mentioned in an interview for the reference work “Authors and Artists for Young Adults.” When she realized concerning the wartime hardships that the remainder of her household had endured, she was horrified and ashamed. “I felt like a deserter,” she mentioned.
She first pursued a profession as an actress, finding out on the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and dealing in repertory theater. She additionally started writing performs. In 1955, she grew to become one of many first feminine tv reporters in England, working for Independent Television News (later ITV). One day, she was requested to check out a brand new sort of typewriter within the newsroom. One sentence led to a different, and he or she realized that she was writing within the voice of a girl who was pregnant, single and on her personal. These random first sentences grew to become the seeds of “The L-shaped Room.”
“I didn’t know I had a book,” she later informed the BBC. “I knew I had a situation.”
The success of the novel gave her the liberty to jot down full time, and he or she stop her tv job. But her life took one other flip when she met and married Chaim Stephenson, a sculptor, and moved to Israel to hitch him on a kibbutz.
The transfer led her mom to accuse her of losing her expertise and putting herself in a harmful and “soul-stunting” state of affairs, Ms. Banks wrote in The Guardian in 2017. But she beloved her adopted nation, and he or she taught English and continued to jot down whereas elevating three sons, till the household moved again to England in 1971.
Ms. Banks wrote two sequels to “The L-Shaped Room” — “The Backward Shadow” (1970) and “Two Is Lonely” (1974) — in addition to two books on the Brontë sisters: “Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës” (1976) and “Path to the Silent Country: Charlotte Brontë’s Years of Fame” (1977).
She started writing books for kids and younger adults within the Seventies, incorporating parts of magic and fantasy that may discover full expression in “The Indian in the Cupboard.” She wrote greater than 45 books for adults and youngsters altogether, many with Jewish themes, in addition to 13 performs produced for radio and theater.
The challenges of single motherhood was a theme Ms. Banks returned to in 2014 in “Uprooted: A Canadian War Story,” a younger grownup novel based mostly on the years that she and her mom spent in Canada through the struggle.
She is survived by three sons, Adiel, Gillon and Omri Stephenson, and three grandchildren. Her husband died in 2016.
Ms. Banks remained productive in her later years. “It’s great being old,” she wrote in The Guardian in 2017, in an essay on the benefits of getting older. “I can be eccentric, self-indulgent — even offensive.”
Indeed, on the age of 85, she touched off one other literary furor when she wrote a letter objecting to The Guardian’s determination to award its youngsters’s fiction prize to David Almond for his e book “A Song for Ella Grey” (2015), writing {that a} e book with “lesbian sex,” in addition to swearing and ingesting, was not acceptable for kids.
A predictable outcry in response to her letter adopted. “Although I’m still on the outs with modern life,” she wrote, “being old means I’ve stopped minding what people think of my opinions.”
Sofia Poznansky contributed reporting,
Source: www.nytimes.com