Bernardine Bishop

Bernardine Anna Livia Mary Bishop (née Wall; 16 August 1939 – 4 July 2013) was an English novelist, teacher and psychotherapist. Her first novel, Perspectives, was published by Hutchinson in 1961. During a half-century interregnum between publishing her first two novels and her third, the 2013 Costa prize-nominated Unexpected Lessons In Love, she brought up a family, taught, and practised as a psychotherapist.

Diagnosed with cancer of the colon in 2008, and subsequently forced to give up her psychotherapy work because of the illness, she reinvigorated her literary career by writing three novels, of which Unexpected Lessons In Love was the first. The book had only just been published when, having been informed that her condition was terminal, she decided to withdraw from chemotherapy and "turn her face towards Jerusalem". She died the following July.

Bishop was born in London, England to a literary family. Her mother, Barbara Wall, a novelist and translator, and her father, Bernard, who wrote on Italian and Spanish history and culture, were leading Catholic thinkers of the day, entertaining a stream of literati including Rene Hague, Gavin Maxwell and Dylan Thomas at their Ladbroke Road home. The poet and suffragist Alice Meynell was a great-grandmother on her mother’s side.

She spent her formative years, during World War II, with her grandmother Madeline at Greatham, West Sussex, and was reunited with her parents in London following the cessation of hostilities. Bishop was educated at the Convent of Our Lady of Sion, Bayswater, west London, and Newnham College, Cambridge, where her lecturers in English included CS Lewis, EM Forster and FR Leavis. Her peers at Cambridge included David Frost and Peter Cook, and the novelist Margaret Drabble.

After graduating she became the youngest defence witness in the celebrated Lady Chatterley trial of 1960, when Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for the publication of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The last witness to be called, she appeared at the behest of Michael Rubinstein, a friend of the family and solicitor for Penguin Books, who believed her testimony would be sufficiently lucid and guileless to illustrate that reading the book had not corrupted her.

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