Namn enligt folkbokföringen: Gilliatt, Penelope Ann Douglass
Andra namn: Conner, Penelope Ann Douglass (birth)
Födelsedag: 1932-03-25
Avled: 1993-05-09
Kön: female
Nationalitet: England
UK
Födelseort: London, England, UK
Dödsort: London, England, UK
Bostadsorter: London, England
New York, New York, USA
Utbildning: Bennington College
Yrken: film critic
novelist
short story writer
screenwriter
magazine editor
Relationer: Osborne, John (husband | divorced)
Organisationer: The New Yorker
Priser och utmärkelser: American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature, 1972)
Kort biografi: Penelope Gilliatt, née Conner, was born in London. Her father Cyril Conner, originally a lawyer, became a director of the BBC in in the North East, and she spent her early childhood in Northumberland. After attending Queen's College in England, she won a scholarship to Bennington College in Vermont. She dropped out during her first year and worked briefly for the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York City. She won a short story contest sponsored by British Vogue and returned to London to join the magazine's staff, rising to become features editor. She also contributed articles to The Spectator and New Statesman. In 1954, she married Roger Gilliatt, a neurosurgeon. She made her debut as a novelist in 1965 with One by One, later adapted into the screenplay for the award-winning 1971 film Sunday, Bloody Sunday. From 1961 to 1967, she served as film critic and drama critic of The Observer in London. In 1968, she joined the staff of The New Yorker as film critic, alternating columns at six-month intervals with Pauline Kael, a position she held until 1979. After a divorce from her first husband, she was married to playwright John Osborne from 1963 to 1968. During her career, she wrote five novels but was best known for her short stories, collected in Come Back if It Doesn't Get Better (1969), Nobody's Business (1972), Splendid Lives (1978), Quotations From Other Lives (1982), and They Sleep Without Dreaming (1985).

Medlemmar

Recensioner

Unholy Fools av Penelope Gilliatt

Great

Flaggad

Dermot_Butler | Nov 8, 2023 |

One By One av Penelope Gilliatt

An odd but engaging blend of melodrama and satire. Unfortunately, though Gilliatt could clearly write very well the plot felt too rushed to be successful.

Flaggad

giovannigf | Apr 4, 2020 |

The cutting edge av Penelope Gilliatt

I have to admit first thing that when I read this class of contemporary(ish) English novel I often have to fight off a sense of intellectual inadequacy. It's not an easy to matter to write convincingly about people who are brilliant but Gilliatt succeeds. And she does more than that. The novel is an exercise in crisp economy, in not one wasted word or detail. I didn't want to like either the novel or to care one bit about the two brothers, Benedick, musician and composer, and Peregrine Corbett, a well-known conservative literary/political writer of a type we don't have any more in the U.S.A. but who might be epitomized by the late William F. Buckley. The one quibble for me is that the woman, Joanna, whom they both love never really came to life as did the brothers and there is, as often happens, that slightly kinky British thing (I'm thinking of Mary Wesley, Iris Murdoch and so on) of complicated love tangles that Americans just can't pull off or tolerate. It's short and intense and smart, and to do it justice I expect I should read it again aloud and slowly, although that is not likely to happen, I admit. I would listen to it though if I came across it.
****… (mer)

Flaggad

sibylline | Jan 7, 2018 |

Nobody's Business av Penelope Gilliatt

I'm reading one Virago book per month this year (2012)-- either a reread or a new read. The Gilliatt is new to me. To say her style is crisp or taut or pithy or witty is accurate, but what I liked the most about these stories are two things: one, I was constantly surprised by the characters, what they say to each other, how they interact, their hopes and fears, and I was tremendously moved by their predicaments. If I had to state a theme that runs through the stories it is of being lonely in the midst of belonging. These are characters who do much of what they say and do, perverse as it may appear to be, because they love their families or friends. Gilliatt understands how complicated motives and behaviours are, how a person can be compassionate enough to allow a behavior they dislike in a beloved friend or mate (but not without blowing of steam now and then). Occasionally the mood darkens when it is apparent that the character may not have a choice, not really. It is the prose that I liked the best, simply the way the sentences are strung together. Some quotes:

During a tour of a 'new' office building the manager blathers on about the effect of the new arrangements: There's a new vigor," said the office head.
"You'd have got the same effect if you'd cleaned up the old cloak rooms," the distinguished European woman muttered. Ed heard her; he generally caught remarks that went by other people. A sort of fatuous cheerfulness seemed to him to govern most talkers, and he had an ear for the softly mutinous."
Softly mutinous -- brilliant!

In another story an older man, a scholar in a slump, is thinking: " His mind seemed to be acting like mercury. He saw it slipping around in a pool and then dividing into drops that ran apart."

My favorite story is perhaps the first one about the robotic engineer, an Englishman (probably at Princeton or the like on a fellowship) who has a robot named FRANK, that he has programmed to do small things. His wife is in Rome on business, the housekeeper came with them to New Jersey but is homesick and he sends her back to England for a holiday from which she might or might not return, he misses his wife, he's a mess, but he's trying to keep it all together for himself and their child. In some ways FRANK is the only one he can talk to and interact with. Prescient - written in the late 60's or very early 70's.
****1/2… (mer)