Pat Barr (writer)
English novelist (1934–2018)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.[citation needed]
Barr died in Norwich in 2018.[1]