Pat Barr (writer)

Pat Barr
Born
Patricia Miriam Copping[1]

(1934-04-25)25 April 1934[1]
Norwich, United Kingdom[1][2]
Died20 March 2018(2018-03-20) (aged 83)[1]
Occupationwriter, novelist, social historian, journalist
NationalityBritish

Pat Barr (25 April 1934 – 20 March 2018) was an English novelist, writer of social history and journalist.[1] She was born in Norwich, attended Norwich High School for Girls and studied English at the University of Birmingham.[1][2] She worked as a teacher at Yokohama International School in Japan.[1][2][3] She also studied for a master's degree from University College London.[1]

Career

In the 1960s Barr was Assistant Secretary of the National Old People's Welfare Council.[4] In this role she wrote The Elderly: Handbook on Care and Services (1968), and edited a book of older people's memories of their childhoods, I Remember: An Arrangement for Many Voices (1970).

Her non-fiction books include:

  • The Coming of the Barbarians: A Story of Western Settlement in Japan, 1853-1870 (1967)
  • The Deer Cry Pavilion: A Story of Westerners in Japan, 1868–1905 (1988)
  • A Curious Life for a Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird, A Remarkable Victorian Traveller (1970)
  • Foreign Devils: Westerners in the Far East, the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (1970)
  • To China With Love: The Lives and Times of Protestant Missionaries in China 1860-1900 (1972)
  • The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (1976)
  • Taming the Jungle: The Men Who Made British Malaya (1977)
  • Simla: A Hill Station in British India (1978) (co-authored with Ray Desmond)
  • Japan (1980)
  • The Dust in the Balance: British Women in India, 1905-1945 (1989)

Her first novel, written jointly with her husband John Barr under the pen name Laurence Hazard, was The Andean Murders (1960).[1]

Her other novels include:

  • Chinese Alice (1981)
  • Uncut Jade (1982); Chinese Alice and Uncut Jade were published as one book, Jade, in 1984[5]
  • Kenjiro. A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Japan (1985)
  • Coromandel (1988)

Four of her novels were bestsellers.[1]

Barr was active as a feminist and as a member of the Women in Media group.[1] She contributed a chapter, "Newspapers", to Is This Your Life?: Images of Women in the Media (1977), and wrote The Framing of the Female (1978). She also wrote for the feminist magazine Spare Rib.

Barr died in Norwich in 2018.[1]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Faulder, Carolyn (12 April 2018). "Pat Barr obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 February 2019.
  2. ^ a b c Pat Barr (19 May 2011). The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India. Faber & Faber. pp. 196–. ISBN 978-0-571-27910-4. Retrieved 6 February 2019.
  3. ^ "The Coming of the Barbarians". Kirkus.
  4. ^ Barr, Pat (1970). I Remember: an arrangement for many voices. Macmillan.
  5. ^ "Winners for the summer season: lighter fiction". The Bookseller. 24 March 1984. pp. 1293–3. Retrieved 18 October 2025.

Further reading

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