Pat Barr (writer)

Pat Barr (1934–2018) was a British 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]

Pat Barr
BornPatricia Miriam Copping[1]
(1934-04-25)25 April 1934[1]
Norwich, United Kingdom[1][2]
Died20 March 2018(2018-03-20) (aged 83)[1]
Occupationwriter, novelist, social historian, journalist
NationalityBritish

Career

Barr's history books included:

  • 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)
  • The Dust in the Balance: British Women in India, 1905-1945 (1989)

Her first novel, jointly with her husband John Barr under the name Laurence Hazard, was The Andean Murders (1960).[1]

Her other novels included:

  • Chinese Alice (1981) (American title: Jade)
  • Uncut Jade (1983)
  • Kenjiro: a novel of nineteenth-century Japan (1985)
  • Coromandel (1988)

Four of her novels were best-sellers.[1]

Barr was active as a feminist and part 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 Spare Rib.

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).

Barr died in Norwich in 2018.[1]

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References
  1. Faulder, Carolyn (12 April 2018). "Pat Barr obituary". The Guardian. Retrieved 6 February 2019.
  2. Pat Barr (19 May 2011). The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India. Faber & Faber. pp. 196–. ISBN 978-0-571-27910-4. Retrieved 6 February 2019.
  3. "The Coming of the Barbarians". Kirkus.
  4. Barr, Pat (1970). I Remember: an arrangement for many voices. Macmillan.

Further reading
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