WHEN, IN 1957, Elizabeth Montagu published her third novel, This Side of the Truth — which features a 13-year-old girl called Sarah and her intelligent analysis of the fraught relationships around her — reviews were as glowing as those of her first two had been: “funny, unsentimental, compassionate and sad”, said The Times Literary Supplement; “so brilliant merely as a tour de force that its quite exceptional merits as a ‘straight’ novel are likely to be underestimated”, said the New Statesman. An advertisement for the novel referred to Montagu’s tremendous potential and mounting achievement.
The book explored a prominent theme in her work: the power of imagination. Sarah observes that people without it have no idea of the extraordinary, exciting, never-ending mystery and complication of things, and is told that she must make good use of it — write a book, perhaps. But she also discovers that it can be a burden and a danger: “I couldn’t have thought it all up, could I?” she asks herself, when the family holiday ends in tragedy, “because if I did, well, that makes everything far worse on account of what happened after. What I mean is, if you invent things you make them happen.”
In fact Montagu did not produce another novel. She found writing difficult and painful, and she couldn’t begin until she had got what she called the “click”, which she achieved by drinking. Eventually she became ill because of her dependence on alcohol, and the volume of short stories published in 1966 was her last book. Nevertheless, as Sybille Bedford recently suggested, she will surely have a small but clear place in 20th-century literature.
Elizabeth Montagu was born in 1917, the youngest child of the 9th Earl of Sandwich and his American wife, Alberta (née Sturges). She was brought up at the family seat in Huntingdonshire and educated at North Foreland Lodge in Hampshire and in Munich, where she studied German.
She had a sister, Faith, and two brothers, one of whom, Drogo, was killed in the Second World War; the other, known as Hinch (Lord Hinchingbrooke, and later the 10th Earl of Sandwich), became an MP.
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As a debutante in the early 1930s Montagu was much photographed and briefly became a model for Ponds. She moved in aristocratic circles and was a friend of John Colville (who was later knighted): she is to be found in The Fringes of Power, his Downing Street diaries, dining with him in a variety of grand settings and on one occasion irritating him with her views on religion and the ineffectiveness of British propaganda in America. She was a keen equestrian, her alarming riding style — no fence was too high or track too muddy, it seemed — testament to her physical fearlessness.
She was trained in nursing, an occupation which suited her well; she handed out bedpans, it was noted, rather as though she were handing out bouquets at a garden party, but she was efficient and empathetic. One year she was awarded a bronze medal — which might have been gold had she not ridden round the (unoccupied) operating table on a bicycle.
During the war she was sister in charge of casualty at St Thomas’ Hospital in London and from 1947 to 1950 she taught at the Royal College of Nursing. She also spent some time as a midwife in Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, London.
She needed to write, however, and, having given up nursing, she moved to Dorset and produced her first novel, Waiting for Camilla — about a woman who returns home because her sister is dying — published in 1953. The effect of Camilla’s arrival on each member of the family seems to become more significant and disturbing than the death itself. “The author writes with cool detachment,” one reviewer observed, “pinning down futility with the point of an acid pen.”
A study of evil, The Small Corner, followed in 1955. Graham Greene noted that Montagu had a done “a difficult thing, triumphantly”: the main character, Henrietta, who acts out of envy, is despicable but also pitiable and understandable.
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In the late 1950s Montagu moved to the South of France with her close friend Anne Balfour-Fraser, who later described their time there as one long party. Still, Montagu managed to work: she translated the drama Das kalte Licht (The Cold Light) by Carl Zuckmayer in 1958 and wrote short stories. Some of them were published in Encounter magazine and Botteghe Oscure, an international literary magazine printed in four languages; others were deemed too short, long or obscure for publication but were important as the sediments of a novelist’s career, as Montagu put it, and “a relief, sometimes, from the intense exigence of one book or, alternatively, the exhaustion and lassitude which follows or precedes the birth of another”. Ten of the pieces were collected in Change and Other Stories (1966).
Eventually, after struggling increasingly with her drink problem and suffering a perforated stomach ulcer, which had to be operated on, she and Balfour-Fraser decided to sell the house and Montagu moved to Mougins, where she lived with Charlie Delmas, a shipping heiress, until Delmas died. She gave up alcohol and smoking and spent her last years in a flat in Battersea, looked after by a number of carers.
Montagu (known to her friends as Betts) had great style: she tore around in a yellow open-top Sunbeam, collected art and herself liked to paint. She was witty and great fun, encouraging to her nephews and nieces, kind but capable of putting a brash or conceited person in his place.
She had a number of relationships but never married, and always appreciated the richness of her female friendships.
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Lady Elizabeth Montagu, writer, was born on July 4, 1917. She died on January 10, 2006, aged 88.