Emma Tennant

Emma Christina Tennant FRSL (20 October 1937 – 21 January 2017) was an English novelist and editor of Scottish extraction, known for a post-modern approach to her fiction, often imbued with fantasy or magic. Several of her novels give a feminist or dreamlike twist to classic stories, such as Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. She also published under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy. Early life Tennant was of Scottish extraction, the daughter of Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, and Elizabeth, Lady Glenconner (née Powell). She remembered her father as a mix of rage and benevolence. She was the niece of Edward and Stephen Tennant, and the half-sister of Colin Tennant, later the third Baron Glenconner, from her father's first marriage. Born in London, she spent the World War II years at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her parents were regularly absent, while The Glen "was the strangest possible place. I knew no other world at all until I was nine." The family then resettled in London. Tennant was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, but left when she was 15. She spent some time at an Oxford finishing school, studying languages and the history of art, and a year in Paris at The Louvre. In the mid-1960s, her parents built a house in Corfu, known as Rovinia. She spent much time there throughout her life and later in 2001, published a book about the building of the house, entitled A House in Corfu. Career Tennant worked as a travel writer for Queen magazine and an editor for Vogue. Her first novel, The Colour of Rain, was published under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy (chosen with the help of an ouija board) when she was 26. Submitted to the Spanish Prix Formentor, the response of the chair of the judges, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia meant that she suffered writer's block for some years afterwards. According to Tennant, he "tossed my book into a wastepaper basket and declared, 'This book stands for the decadence of British contemporary culture.'" It was not until 1973 that her second novel, The Time of the Crack, was first published. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine, Bananas, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists. She was the editor of the Viking series Lives of Modern Women.