Nerina Shute

Nerina Shute (17 July 1908 – 20 October 2004) was an English writer and journalist, described by the Sunday Times as "the amazingly colourful, brilliant and bisexual film critic".

Shute was born in Prudhoe, Northumberland. Her father, Cameron Shute, was the ne'er-do-well son of a general, Sir Charles Shute, who had fought at Balaclava and was MP for Brighton from 1874 to 1880.

Her racy mother, née Amy Bertha ("Renie") Pepper Stavely, was of a well-to-do family with its seat at Woldhurstlea, near Crawley, West Sussex and was the author of a rip-roaring Edwardian novel The Unconscious Bigamist. She was sedulous in not sleeping with her lovers: she married six of them. The second of these husbands was Nerina’s father. After a childhood overshadowed by her parents’ fast living in London and then Hollywood, in the course of which she sold her first story to McClure’s Magazine at 16, for $150, she returned to England. There, living in Devon, she soon became as discontented as she had been in America.

She arrived in London in 1928. While staying at the hostel which later inspired Muriel Spark, she took a post at the Times Book Club. Soon she graduated to Film Weekly, where she was told: “You have a very impertinent pen” after calling Madeleine Carroll a "ruthless Madonna". Fearing the worst, she was startled to get a rise and requests for more of the same; she provided it, with sparkling dismissals of the "It" set of the day. For all her bravura, though, she was vexed by "it", by the "sheer awkwardness," she wrote, "of being a modern girl and, at the same time, a virgin".

She contemplated marriage to a man called Charles, a doctor who had been struck off for performing an abortion, but thought better of it and promptly missed him while the capital buzzed. Of London's lesbians she noted: “They lied, cheated and had hysterics . . . the code of homosexuality might be all right in theory but the people who practised it were intolerable.”

All this would form a part of the novel, Another Man’s Poison, which she had written in the evenings and at weekends. Palpably autobiographical, it tells of young Melis Gordon whose wild mother leaves a naval husband for Hollywood lovers. With descriptions of American schoolgirl life, its heroine even writes a prizewinning story before being recalled to an England of dull Devon and wild, flirtatious London. It appeared in 1931.

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