Laski, Marghanita (1915–1988)

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Laski, Marghanita (1915–1988)

British novelist and critic. Name variations: (pseudonym) Sarah Russell. Born on October 24, 1915, in London, England; died on February 6, 1988, in Dublin, Ireland; daughter of Neville J. Laski (a lawyer) and Phina Gaster Laski; granddaughter of Dr. Moses Gaster; niece of Harold Laski; educated in Manchester; Somerville College, Oxford, B.A., 1936; married John Eldred Howard (a publisher), in 1937; children: Rebecca Howard ; Jonathan Howard.

Honorary fellow of Manchester Polytechnic (1971); member of Annan Committee of Inquiry in Future of Broadcasting (1974–77); served as vice-chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain (1982), and chair of its Literature Panel (1980–88); worked as journalist, critic, broadcaster and novelist; contributed to Oxford English Dictionary.

Selected novels:

Love on the Supertax (1944); (under pseudonym Sarah Russell) To Bed with Grand Music (1946); Tory Heaven, or Thunder on the Right (published as Toasted English, 1949); Little Boy Lost (1949); The Village (1952); The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953).

Selected criticism:

Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett (1950); Jane Austen and Her World (1969); George Eliot and Her World (1973); From Palm to Pine: Rudyard Kipling Abroad and at Home (1987).

Born in London in 1915, Marghanita Laski was the daughter of Phina Gaster Laski and Neville J. Laski, a King's counsel. Her maternal grandfather, Dr. Moses Gaster, was the chief rabbi of the Portuguese and Spanish Jews in England, and Laski grew up influenced by his religious views, as well as by the political views of her uncle Harold Laski, a renowned liberal. After bouts studying fashion design and philological research, Marghanita decided on a career in journalism, taking her B.A. at Somerville, a women's college at Oxford University. She married publisher John Eldred Howard in 1937 and took jobs in publishing, diary farming, nursing and intelligence, eventually working as a radio and television broadcaster. It was not until the birth of her second child that she began writing books.

Between 1944 and 1953, Laski published six novels, including Love on the Supertax (1944), The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953), and Little Boy Lost, a 1949 novel made into a Bing Crosby melodrama four years later. Her first serious novel, Little Boy Lost was the story of a father's search for his son in France immediately after World War II. Laski was a versatile novelist: her first book, Love on the Supertax, was a science-fiction account of postwar England; her second, Toasted English, was a satire about a mock utopia in which the English caste system is revived. The Village (1952) was a comedy of manners about class consciousness, and her last—and most popular—novel, The Victorian Chaise-Longue, was a suspense thriller, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "a little jewel of horror."

Laski's first work of biographical criticism was 1950's Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett, a study of Victorian children's authors Juliana Horatia Ewing, Mary Louisa Molesworth and Frances Hodgson Burnett . Laski's reputation as a critical biographer increased with the publication of Jane Austen and Her World in 1969. Laski also write critical studies of George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans ) and Rudyard Kipling, along with two religious studies and a play, The Offshore Island (1955). A prolific contributor to periodicals, Laski was also an adept lexicographer and editor, writing for the Oxford English Dictionary and numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review and the Manchester Guardian.