The author Lynne Reid Banks, known for her novel The L-Shaped Room and her children’s book series The Indian in the Cupboard, has died at the age of 94.
She died of cancer “peacefully with her family around her” on Thursday afternoon, her agent, James Wills, said. Her son Gillon Stephenson said she “leaves a massive legacy of wonderful work”, adding that every day he “receives messages from people saying what a difference she has made”.
Reid Banks was born in Barnes, south-west London, in 1929. In 1940, during the second world war, she was evacuated with her mother and cousin Christopher to Saskatoon in the Canadian prairies for five years.
After returning to England, Reid Banks attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) before becoming a secretary and a freelance journalist. In 1955, she became one of the first female news reporters on British television, appearing on ITN for six years and interviewing stars including Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Louis Armstrong and Agatha Christie.
During her downtime from journalism she wrote a novel, The L-Shaped Room, about an unmarried woman who is kicked out of her family home when she becomes pregnant and moves into a run-down boarding house in London. The 1960 publication was an unexpected hit and was later turned into a film, landing Leslie Caron an Oscar nomination for best actress, as well as a Bafta and Golden Globe award.
“Banks’s compassionate first novel examines the stigma of unmarried motherhood in pre-pill, pre-Abortion Act Britain”, wrote Victoria Segal in her description of the book for the Guardian’s 1,000 novels everyone must read series. “While the social climate has changed drastically since publication, a transgressive frisson still crackles from the pages.”
After the film of The L-Shaped Room, Reid Banks had plays on TV and radio, and published a second novel, An End to Running. Just as her career was taking off in 1962, she moved to Israel, having fallen in love with the Anglo-Israeli sculptor Chaim Stephenson.
The author taught for eight years on a kibbutz, and she and Stephenson married in 1965. In her Guardian obituary of her husband, the novelist wrote: “To have lived for 55 years with a man of such courage and sweetness, and watched his gift evolve to produce such powerful and beautiful works, has been the greatest happiness and privilege of my life.”
By the time Reid Banks and Stephenson returned to Britain in 1971, they had three sons, including Gillon, with whom Reid Banks lived in her later years, in Shepperton, Surrey. The influence of the writer’s time in Israel can be seen in her books One More River, Broken Bridge and Children at the Gate, which are set partly or mainly on kibbutzim.
Once back in the UK, Reid Banks said she “stumbled upon the idea of bringing a toy plastic American Indian to life in a magic cupboard” for a children’s book. The first book from the series, The Indian in the Cupboard, was published in 1980. The fantasy story was turned into a film in 1995 starring Steve Coogan and Richard Jenkins.
She wrote many more children’s stories during her career, including The Red Red Dragon, Angela and Diabola, The Spice Rack and Tiger Tiger, which Michael Morpurgo said “burns brightly to the very last page”.
Interviewed by the author Rob Kent for his blog in 2013, Reid Banks said her favourite thing about writing was “when it’s really flowing, so you can escape your everyday life into somebody else’s world”, as well as “when you’ve just finished, and know what you’ve written is incredibly, world-beatingly brilliant. Before the editor gets her hands on it and tells you to re-write it or cut it by half. This last has happened to me. (I turned it into two books and got paid twice.)”
In 2017, Reid Banks wrote in the Guardian about her mother, who killed herself in 1982, and had been disapproving of her daughter’s decision to marry a Jew and live on a kibbutz. “Antisemitism is a disease. That’s what I think,” Reid Banks wrote. “It’s like a virus that can infect an otherwise healthy psyche. It’s also a curse that can mar what could have been healthy, happy relationships.”
Writing about old age in the Guardian in 2017, Reid Banks said: “We’re the luckiest generation that’s ever lived. We can look back and remember events that to younger people are only dry lines in history books and images on screens. To us they were real. We’ve had the best of this world.”
The “About me” section of her website finished with a limerick:
There was an old lady called Lynne
Who should have been shoved In the bin.
But she keeps on going,
Shows no signs of slowing –
And – no. It’s not down to the gin.
