Four days ago the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala died at the age of eighty-five. She was a gifted and eloquent writer of stories, novels and screenplays, thoroughly at home in her craft, which was deeply evocative of human life and relationships. Her beautiful screenplay adaptations of E.M. Forster's novels, A Room with a View and Howard’s End, deservedly won two Oscars; and her eighth novel, Heat and Dust, received the Booker Prize in 1975.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's stories often appeared in The New Yorker, and the following tribute was written for that magazine by Joshua Rothman.
"Beginning in 1957, Jhabvala published thirty-one stories in The New Yorker; her most recent story, 'The Judge’s Will,' was published only a few weeks ago, in the March 25th issue.... In the course of her career, she wrote more than two dozen screenplays, most of them as an integral part of the Merchant and Ivory production team ....
"One of Jhabvala’s short-story collections, published in 1998, is called East Into Upper East. The title is a play on her own life story: starting in the seventies, she split her time between New York and New Delhi. But, in fact, that understates her geographical range. Ruth Prawer was born into a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, in 1927. Her father, Marcus, was a lawyer, and originally from Poland; her grandfather on her mother’s side was cantor of a large Cologne synagogue. In 1939, the family fled the Nazis and landed in London. It wasn’t until 1948 that her father learned the fate of his Polish relatives; when he discovered that they had all died in concentration camps, he committed suicide.
"Ruth went on to live an international life. She earned a degree in English Literature at Queen Mary College, London University, and in 1951 she married Cyrus Jhabvala, an architect. Together, they moved to Delhi, where they raised three daughters, who are now married to an Indian, an American, and an Englishman. She had never felt quite settled in India, and eventually she moved to New York.
"In a 1979 lecture, Jhabvala spoke about her rootlessness. She shared her admiration for writing that emerged from a sense of tradition and landscape, but she herself felt rootless: 'I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture, till I feel—till I am—nothing.' And yet, she said, this was one of her strengths. Many of her stories are about a kind of inner travel: feeling rootless, her protagonists find new ways to feel at home in the worlds they happen to inhabit. In 'The Teacher,' one of her recent stories for The New Yorker, a woman living alone in upstate New York becomes friends with a fraudulent guru; perhaps because his ideas are nonsense, she finds herself making sense of her own life. In 'The Judge’s Will,' a woman meets her husband’s long-time mistress, and the encounter pushes her to see her husband and son in a new, and possibly more rewarding and realistic, way.
"[The New Yorker has] unlocked six of Jhabvala’s stories: 'The Judge’s Will,' 'The Teacher,' 'Aphrodisiac,' and 'Innocence,' which have all been published recently, along with 'On Bail,' from 1973, and 'The Interview,' from 1957, which was Jhabvala’s first story for The New Yorker. And subscribers can read all of her stories in our online archive."
Photograph, of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala in 1979, courtesy of Camera Press/Redux.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/04/ruth-prawer-jhabvalas-stories.html#ixzz2Pn2dDAZM