Angela Lambert

Oct 1 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

Angela Lambert

SHE was perhaps a modern woman and she spoke of the benefits of the pill and equal opportunities; but, in her writing, her smile and her curious stare, there was an understanding of old manners confronting new circumstances,

That feeling permeates her most famous novel, A Rather English Marriage (1992), adapted for television by Andrew Davies into a wonderfully tender drama, starring Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Joanna Lumley.

Finney plays a retired squadron leader, full of bluff and ale and hopeless, sad desire for Lumley. Courtenay is a retired milkman, who befriends Finney, and seems to know his place. With these three characters, Angela Lambert tells a wider story of changing class structures, ruined ambition and teasing sex.

Of course, in her examinations of people, Angela Lambert drew from her own experiences of life, which began early in World War II, when she was born Angela Maria Helps in Beckenham, Kent, the daughter of a civil servant. As a little girl, she was packed off to boarding school, leaving the memory that she had been “dumped” by “unfeeling parents”.

These sentiments were expressed in her second novel, No Talking After Lights (1990).

Although some may have regarded her as a blue-stockinged intellectual, her genius lay in middle-browed subjects expressed with sympathy and delicacy.

From school, she advanced to St Hilda’s College, Oxford, reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics, as we nosed into the 1960s, which introduced her to contraception, feminism and improved, “if still far from perfect”, opportunities for women. She enjoyed university to the full, wedding Martin Lambert, who gave her two children during their five-year marriage.

From an early age, Angela Lambert had realised that writing would be her career and she became an assistant editor on Modern Woman. Then, between 1964-7, she was secretary to Lord Longford, who was worried about pornography and the souls of prisoners, including Myra Hindley.

Spells as a TV reporter followed and then she began writing seriously. In 1988, she joined the staff of the new Independent and later contributed to the Mail, Telegraph and Radio 4.

In 1979, she was diagnosed with portal hypertension and devoted greater energy to novels starting her seven with Unquiet Souls: The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy (1984). Her final book was The Lost Life of Eva Braun (2006).

Angela Lambert, writer; born April 14, 1940, died September 26, 2007.