Nina Bawden (Nina Mary Bawden) (née Mabey) Biography

British novelist, born in London, educated at Somerville College, Oxford. Bawden has published many books for both adults and children. The cross-fertilization between her adult and her children's works is unusually marked. She reworked her adult novel Evil by the Sea (1957), publishing a version for children in 1976, and many of her concerns—difficult children, neglected childhoods, the gap between generations—are common to both kinds of writing. She excels at portraits of modern middle-class family life in contemporary London, but frequently returns to the past as a repository of secrets and hidden influences. Two of her most powerful children's books, Carrie's War (1973) and The Peppermint Pig (1975), are set in the recent past and deal with children in exile from their homes; the former evokes her experiences as an evacuee during the Second World War, a formative period on which she drew in her adult novel Circles of Deceit (1987) and in a short book for children, Keeping Henry (1988). Many of her adult novels, notably Anna Apparent (1972), Afternoon of a Good Woman (1976), Walking Naked (1981), and The Ice House (1983) deal with the exposure of a suffering self beneath the prosperous surface. The painful feelings of women in her adult novels have a parallel in the anxieties children suffer at the hands of untrustworthy adults in her children's books. Family Money (1991), an ironic tale of families, ageing, and inheritance, harnesses the tempo of a thriller to an examination of the manners and morals of an acquisitive society. In My Own Time: Almost an Autobiography (1994) recalls the ‘myths, half-truths, fancies and deceits that make up family history’ and gives a moving portrait of her oldest son, who was a schizophrenic. Bawden received the CBE in 1995.