Gay Firth: Gay Firth, who has died aged 68, was a journalist, author and campaigner for equal opportunities, girls' education and sanity in Northern Ireland before such causes became fashionable.
After the death of her husband, Tony, in 1980 she began her journalistic career reviewing fiction for the Times. She was not part of the London literary mafia, and her fiction round-ups were free from spite, but sharp literary judgements were buried beneath the wit. She was passionate about the arts and also reviewed opera, music, painting and the theatre.
She moved to the Financial Times where she worked on the foreign desk, the arts and literary section on Saturdays and special reports. For a time she was letters editor, a post which delighted her as it kept her in touch with the magnates and manipulators who ran the country.
Firth was a highly political animal, but she preferred to act in the background and was discreet about her political allegiances. She cited James Joyce's motto of "Silence, exile and cunning".
Gay Firth was born Virginia Arabella Turtle in Belfast in 1937. She was always known as Gay and laughed to remember a small boy sniggering to a friend at her first junior school: "There's somebody called Gay Turtle arrived in our class."
Her father was a stockbroker and Quaker, Lancelot Turtle. Her mother was from Denver, Colorado, and died when Gay was only nine. Firth, too, was a Quaker, and this was central to her life, with its quietism and its watchword, "Way will be found".
She went to the Mount, the Quaker boarding school in York, and on to Trinity College Dublin, to read history, where the combination of her originality, exuberance and articulate flair soon attracted attention in debating societies and legendary satirical revues for the Players Theatre, with talents such as Terence Brady, the late Ralph Bates and Michael Bogdanovich.
Then she did teacher-training at Cambridge and became part of the brilliant generation that was known as the Cambridge mafia. It included Geoffrey Howe, Ken Clarke, John Gummer, Leon Brittan, Michael Howard, Norman Lamont, Norman Fowler, Christopher Tugendhat and Tony Firth, the broadcaster and journalist whom Gay was to marry.
She was a glamorous figure in those years when even Cambridge was recognising that women had intellectual talents as rich as men's.
In London she and Tony became a distinguished couple in the arts and media world. She moved to Glasgow with him in 1970 when he became programmes controller at Scottish Television. At that time Gay became a founder member of the newly-formed Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, and its first press officer.
She and Tony helped to build bridges across the sectarian glaciers through a stream of joint letters to the Times. Gay was an indefatigable committee woman; a governor of the Girls' Public Day School Trust, and Leighton Park Quaker School, a member of Council for the Accreditation of Teachers, Quaker Diplomats, and others in the cause of reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
Back in Hampstead, Gay was office manager and speechwriter when the Equal Opportunities Commission was being set up in 1974. In those days women faced some derision. Not a feminist, Gay was mindful that equal opportunity applied to men as well as women. Her arguments for equality were crucial in winning credibility on issues such as equality in taxation and banking services.
A keenly observed infectious sense of humour complemented her gift for friendship. She described herself as an Anglo-American Irishwoman, a mother, a widow, a journalist and a bridge player. She is survived by a son, a daughter and a grand-daughter.
Gay Firth: born 1937; died January 9th, 2005