Emma Tennant

Emma Christina Tennant FRSL (20 October 1937 – 21 January 2017) was an English novelist and editor of Scottish extraction, known for a post-modern approach to her fiction, often imbued with fantasy or magic. Several of her novels give a feminist or dreamlike twist to classic stories, such as Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. She also published under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy. She remembered her father as a mix of rage and benevolence. She was the niece of Edward and Stephen Tennant, and the half-sister of Colin Tennant, later the third Baron Glenconner, from her father's first marriage.

Born in London, she spent the World War II years at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her parents were regularly absent, while The Glen "was the strangest possible place. I knew no other world at all until I was nine." The family then resettled in London. Tennant was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, but left when she was 15. She spent some time at an Oxford finishing school, studying languages and the history of art, and a year in Paris at The Louvre.

A large number of books by Tennant followed: thrillers, children's books, fantasies, and several revisionist takes on classic novels, including a sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Pemberley. In later years, she began to treat her own life in such books as Girlitude and Burnt Diaries (both published in 1999), the second of which details her affair with Ted Hughes.

Emma Tennant died on 21 January 2017 in a London hospital from posterior cortical atrophy, a form of Alzheimer's disease.

Selected bibliography Novels The Colour of Rain (as Catherine Aydy), London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964 The Time of the Crack, London: Cape, 1973; as The Crack, London: Penguin, 1978 The Last of the Country House Murders, London: Cape, 1974; New York, Nelson, 1976 Hotel de Dream, London: Gollancz, 1976 The Bad Sister, London: Gollancz; New York: Coward McCann, 1978 Wild Nights, London: Cape, 1979; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980 Alice Fell, London: Cape, 1980 Queen of Stones, London: Cape, 1982 Woman Beware Woman, London: Cape, 1983; as The Half-Mother, Boston: Little Brown, 1985 Black Marina, London: Faber: 1985 The Adventures of Robina, by Herself, London: Faber, 1986; New York:, Persea, 1987. Series: The Cycle of the Sun The House of Hospitalities, London: Viking, 1987 A Wedding of Cousins, London: Viking, 1988 The Magic Drum, London: Viking, 1989 Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde, London: Faber, 1989 (after Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) Sisters and Strangers, London: Grafton, 1990 Faustine, London: Faber: 1991 Pemberley; or, Pride and Prejudice Continued, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993; as Pemberley: A Sequel to Pride and Prejudice, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993 Tess, London: HarperCollins, 1993 An Unequal Marriage; or, Pride and Prejudice Twenty Years Later, London: Sceptre; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994 Travesties, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. Emma in Love: Jane Austen's Emma Continued, London: Fourth Estate, 1996

Non-fiction A House in Corfu, London: Jonathan Cape, 2001

Autobiography Strangers: A Family Romance, London: Jonathan Cape, 1998 Girlitude, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999 Burnt Diaries, Edinburgh: Canongate, 1999