Elliot, Janice

(British, 1931–95)

Elliot was born in Derbyshire, and educated at Oxford. After working on the Sunday Times, she became a full-time writer in 1962. Begin by sampling her acclaimed England Trilogy, comprising A State of Peace (1971), Private Life (1972), and Heaven on Earth (1975). This incisive depiction of conditions in England after the Second World War draws on her experiences of working in the East End of London in the late 1940s. A versatile and inventive author, Elliot's writing borders on science fiction in The Summer People (1980), a futuristic treatment of visitors who remain indefinitely at an isolated holiday resort to await the outcome of global catastrophe. Figures in the Sand (1994) is an imaginative historical novel, in which the governor of a Syrian outpost of the collapsing Roman Empire sets off across the desert in search of redemptive self-knowledge.

Shena Mackay, Penelope Lively  DH