British poet, novelist and story writer Georgina Hammick, who "gave fine-tuned expression to her moment in English culture, writing with wit and insight about class and sexual politics and change," died January 8, the Guardian reported. She was 83.
"Her published output was small--two volumes of stories, two novels--because, although writing was at the center of her life, she suffered painfully from self-doubt; and yet her hard-won prose reads effortlessly. It is stylish and elegant and funny," author Tessa Hadley wrote in the obituary.
Hammick began writing as a poet in the 1970s, but "it was in the short stories and novels that her wry delicacy and irony came into their own, made substantial in her middle-class characters. These are often women, sharply observant and intelligent, comically uncomfortable inside traditions of femininity which no longer fit, yet unable to escape them," Hadley noted.
Her books include People for Lunch; Spoilt; The Arizona Game, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award; and Green Man Running. In 1992, she edited The Book of Love and Loss for Virago. She was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2001.
She married Charles Hammick, a major in the Grenadier Guards, in 1961 and entered "a smart set rather like her parents' world, but was never quite at home there: her leftist politics, vegetarianism and passion for literature set her apart," Hadley wrote, adding that in 1968, they founded Hammicks Bookshop in Farnham, a business that grew eventually to 21 shops. "This brought Georgie into blissful contact with poets and novelists; she was moving into a world where she felt she belonged, and began writing poetry herself, experiencing the 'anguish of wanting to keep going while feeling guilty about it, with the children all in turn disturbing her, and a smoky fug emanating from her writing room.' She gave readings and in 1976 was published, along with four other poets, in a collection by Gollancz titled A Poetry Quintet."
In her 70s, Hammick moved to London and "loved being part of a literary scene and a circle of reading and writing friends," Hadley noted. She served on various arts panels and for English PEN, was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a judge for the V.S. Pritchett and Ackerley prizes among others. To the end of her life, she was working on a novel, revising over and over, and it remains unfinished.