Born: January 12th, 1930
Died: February 25th, 2025
Jennifer Johnston, who has died aged 95, was a prolific novelist, playwright and short story writer who won numerous accolades for her distilled and acutely perceptive writing. They included the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards, the Irish PEN Award, the Whitbread (now the Nero Award), and a shortlisting for the Booker Prize. She was one of the writers nominated in 2014 for the position of first Irish Laureate for Fiction.
Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle called her the greatest Irish writer ever, while writer Dermot Bolger said her books had not always received the attention they deserved, because reliable novelists were not newsworthy. “Johnston simply appears in the shops every three years with another small, intensely crafted volume to be treasured by lovers of good writing,” he wrote in this newspaper when her last novel, Naming the Stars, was published in 2016.
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“As with Samuel Beckett, the novels of Jennifer Johnston grow shorter and wiser as she grows older, so that they have come to embody brevity and resigned, earned, razor-sharp wisdom.”
[ Jennifer Johnston: chronicler of Ireland’s hidden civil warsOpens in new window ]
Publishing her first novel, The Captains and the Kings, at the age of 42, Jennifer Johnston went on to have an exceptionally rich and prolific writing career, spanning five decades. In a Book Club series in this newspaper in 2017, fellow writers and critics celebrated her achievement and her unique contribution to Irish literature.
Acting had been Johnston’s first calling as a teenager, which was hardly surprising in light of her family background in Dublin. The daughter of acclaimed Abbey actress Shelah Richards and playwright and war correspondent Denis Johnston, she was accustomed to the company of actors and writers at their family home in Donnybrook. She often watched her mother on stage from the wings and helped her practise her lines. It left her with a keen ear for the music and rhythm of spoken language. “Words are our greatest joy,” she said. “Whether you are speaking or writing, every single person in the world is a guardian of words.”
Shakespeare and Chekhov remained Johnston’s influences and her most admired writers throughout her life. Studying English and French at Trinity College in the late 1940s, she left without finishing her degree to marry a fellow student, Ian Smyth, a solicitor. The couple moved first to Paris in 1951, and then to London, where she went on to have four children. It was during these years, as her children began to grow up, that the urge to write took hold, she later recalled. “The pain I felt at the age of 35 troubled me. I wanted to see if I could write the pain out of myself.”
This creative compulsion can be observed in many of the characters in Johnston’s novels, especially the young women, who are attempting to express themselves and forge an identity amid confusion and conflicting loyalties – whether of class, religious background or sectarian allegiance.
Drawing on her Protestant family background, her first novels – The Captains and the Kings, The Gates, and How Many Miles To Babylon – were set in the Anglo-Irish milieu of crumbling country houses and genteel poverty, shadowed by the devastating impact of the first World War, followed by the War of Independence. The Captains and the Kings won The Evening Standard Best First Novel Award.
[ Jennifer Johnston: the letter I kept in my wallet for 30 yearsOpens in new window ]
Although her writing career was taking off in the early 1970s it was a period of upheaval in Johnston’s personal life. Her first marriage ended in divorce and she married the lawyer and dendrologist David Gilliland, moving to his family home, Brook Hall, overlooking the Foyle outside Derry.
Her 1979 novel The Old Jest won the Whitbread Prize and was turned into a movie called The Dawning, starring Anthony Hopkins. “I was never so happy as in the first 15 years of my writing,” she said in an interview in 2017.
Her first play of many, The Nightingale and Not the Lark, appeared on stage in 1981 while in 1989 her play O Ananias, Azarias and Misael won the Giles Cooper Award.
While Johnston was initially associated with the Big House literary tradition, she was above all a minutely observant chronicler of family dysfunction in Ireland, against the background of wider social, political and cultural change. Deeply sympathetic as she was, this did not hinder her from being clear sighted and tough in tackling the anguish of violent deaths during the Troubles, in novels such as Shadows On Our Skin (1977) and The Railway Station Man (1984). The latter novel was adapted into a film starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. Nor did she shy from the equally difficult subjects of child sexual abuse, rape and incest – most notably in The Invisible Worm (1991) and Grace and Truth (2005).
“I am not sure in which tense I live, the present or the past,” says Laura, the damaged central character in The Invisible Worm, and this became Johnston’s overarching theme. As traumas from the past return, her characters attempt to clamber out of their echo chambers.
Grief for lost brothers, absent fathers, and emotionally absent mothers recurs as a leitmotif in her novels and plays, and in interviews she often returned to her father Denis Johnston’s abrupt disappearance from her life as a seven-year-old child, when her parents’ marriage broke down and he left Dublin.
Her 2009 novel, Truth or Fiction, is widely regarded as a portrayal of her father, in the character of an ageing Dalkey-based playwright who feels that his work has been overlooked in later life. Far from a petty settling of scores, this is a generally genial depiction of a self-involved man struggling to accept his displacement to the sidelines of life. In this, it is typical of Johnston’s treatment of her many elderly characters and their ageing bodies: wryly humorous and sympathetic, wise without being sentimental.
[ Lost in transition: the fiction of Jennifer JohnstonOpens in new window ]
Family secrets, omissions, silences and lies permeate her novels, and as she developed as a writer, she increasingly began to take more risks with form: playing with time frames, incorporating different narrative points of view in the form of letters and diary entries, fragments of poems and songs, creating a loose collage effect. Shifting back and forth between past and present, allowing small details to accumulate, her style was elegantly described by critic Deborah Singmaster as “pointillist”. Other commentators deemed it to be excessively sketchy, especially in her most recent novels, which have not been very well received critically.
In her later years, Johnston became a stern critic of her own work, especially her early novel The Gates (1973) – “I can’t bear it” – and expressed puzzlement that it was Shadows On Our Skin (1977) that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her own preference among her books was for The Illusionist (1995), in which a middle-aged woman, Stella, gradually emerged from the shadow of her husband to find her own voice as a writer. It seems one of the most personal of Johnston’s books, expressing her own experience of writing as an utter necessity. “What could I do if I didn’t write,” she asked a few years ago, in relief at returning to her regular, steady pattern of publication following a brief fallow period.
An interview she gave to Irish Times journalist Arminta Wallace on the occasion of her Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 captures her ready laugh and vigorously candid conversation, as she reflected back on life. “It’s one bloody awful muddle from the moment you’re born until the moment you die. You might as well just try and muddle through.”
She returned from Derry to Dublin in her later years so that she could be close to her family and settled in Dún Laoghaire. In 2019 she donated her writing desk, which was made to her precise specifications several decades earlier, and nearly 2,000 of her books to Dún Laoghaire Rathdown Libraries. The collection is housed in dlr Lexicon. She previously donated her archive to Trinity College Dublin. Dlr Lexicon hosted a celebrated exhibition of her work in 2020 to mark her 90th birthday.
[ ‘How has life led me to this moment?’: Creativity in Jennifer JohnstonOpens in new window ]
When her last novel, Naming the Stars was published in 2016, RTÉ‘s Arena presenter Seán Rocks asked how vital the act of writing was to her at that point in her life. “It’s very, very important to me because it’s my life,” she said.
Jennifer Johnston is survived by her children Patrick, Sarah, Lucy and Malachi, her grandchildren Sam Daniels and Attikos Lemos Smyth, her brother Micheal and half-brother Rory. She was predeceased by her husband, David Gilliland, former husband Ian Smyth and half-brother Jeremy.
