General
Jennifer Johnston, 95, Novelist Who Probed Ireland’s Fault Lines, Dies
She explored tensions among the social classes and within families in fiction that prompted Roddy Doyle to call her “Ireland’s greatest writer.”
Jennifer Johnston, an admired Irish novelist whose precise, carefully woven fictions depicted historic fault lines in her country’s upper crust and frailties in its latter-day middle class, died on Feb. 25 in Dun Laoghaire, outside Dublin. She was 95.
Her death, in a nursing home, was announced by President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland, who praised her “deep and meaningful examination of the nature and limitations of identity, family and personal connections” in 20th-century Ireland.
Ms. Johnston’s specialty was depicting the wounds of memory and the frustrations and disappointments beneath an apparently genteel coexistence of the social classes and within families, especially in the Protestant Anglo-Irish upper strata — hurts that sometimes boiled over into violence. She was herself born into a Protestant family.
These themes were explored in nearly two dozen novels and a dozen plays, in settings that would become deeply familiar to her readers.
Perhaps her most enduring novel is “How Many Miles to Babylon?” (1974), which looks at a forbidden friendship across the class divide set against upper-class unease during World War I. “Fool’s Sanctuary” (1987) explores what can go wrong beneath the gilded surfaces of the big country house.
