PD James has died at age 94. She had written 20 crime novels, enjoyed a long career as a public servant and received some of the highest literary honours right up until the end of her life.
Her full name is Phyllis Dorothy James but she chose a pseudonym when she started writing novels because in 1962 it was still difficult, if not impossible, to be published as a woman. She chose the pseudonym PD James because the initials created an enigma around her and, most importantly, gave the public the impression she was a man.
James spent 47 years in the head of her male hero Adam Dalgliesh. “He is a male version of me. Brainier than me but his emotions are mine,” she told The Telegraph in 2010. In order to succeed in an industry and society that sidelined women, she constructed herself as male in her capacity as the author and the hero of her novels.
Truth be told she was a hero herself.
She married Connor Bantry White in 1941, at age 21 and kept her maiden name. She has said she expected when they married to have a long and normal life as a doctor’s wife, but her life and marriage became far from conventional. Her husband suffered a mental breakdown when he returned from the war, and would spend the rest of his life in full time psychiatric care. The government did not consider White’s condition to have been brought on by trauma suffered in war, so he did not receive a disability pension. He died at age 44.
By her late twenties James was responsible for supporting both her husband and their two daughters: “So I had him and two daughters to support, and did evening classes in hospital administration to get my qualifications. Then I was put in charge of psychiatric units and I got two books out of that,” she said.
James needed to get a job to support the family but she had no university education – she was forced to finish her studies in high school because her father did not believe in educating girls. Despite the fact that she no formal qualifications, she took the exam to join the civil service and got the third top mark in the country.
When she received a letter offering her a job, it was address to “sir”, which was crossed out and had “madam” handwritten next to it. “It was so rare for women to take the exam,” she explained.
She worked in the public service until her sixties, when she left to write crime novels full time. She was appointed chair of the Booker Prize, the Society of Authors and the Arts Council Literature Advisory Panel and was also appointed governor of the BBC. In 1983, she was appointed OBE. She was also made a life peer – Lady James of Holland Park – in the House of Lords in 1991.
Having spent decades caring for a husband in psychiatric care, working in psychiatric wards herself and writing psychopathic characters, towards the end of her life she offered some of her observations on the impacts of mental illness.
“With mental illness you are talking about the difference between the mind and the brain. How do you treat it? Nowadays, instead of spending months and months on a couch, you are encouraged to recognise what is wrong with you and take some action. Deal with it through medication or whatever. That to me seems reasonable and logical. I’m sure clinical depression is a physical illness. A descent into hell. Not to be confused with the mild depression we all suffer from from time to time. The trouble today is that we all feel we have the right to be happy all the time, and we don’t.”
She wrote her last novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, in 2011, and died yesterday aged 94 as one of the world’s most successful novelists, against all imaginable odds.