JOAN ABSE was the wife of Dannie Abse, the poet, and among their many friends she was known for her gentleness and her devotion to him and her children. But she was also an excellent writer herself. As a young woman she was a notable radical.
She was born in 1926 in St Helens, Lancashire, where she went to the grammar school. By the age of 14 she was branch secretary of the local Independent Labour Party. She was driven above all by her pacifist zeal; she would later be an active member of CND and a supporter of the Greenham Common women’s campaign.
At the age of 17 she became a student at the London School of Economics, which was at that time evacuated to Cambridge. After having lived in “one of the dirtiest towns in Lancashire”, as she called it, she found Cambridge a “delightful oasis of happiness and fulfilment in a world bent on destruction”. She still had a child’s green ration book, which entitled her to special issues of bananas, but she was already quite prepared to tackle Harold Laski, one of her teachers at LSE, with her passionate convictions.
Though he was widely thought to be the living incarnation of the “red menace”, she, on the contrary, found him rather pink. She harangued him with her belief in the “probable imminence of the millennium” — and long afterwards she still remembered his kindly put-down. “There is much virtue in ‘if’, ” he told her.
She next got a job in London in the library of the Financial Times, and met her husband in one of the Swiss Cottage cafés where young poets and political radicals gathered in the years just after the war. They were married in 1951 and settled in Golders Green.
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During the 1950s her husband, who was born in Wales to Jewish parents, was simultaneously pursuing his career in medicine as a chest specialist and making his name as a poet and novelist. His very successful first novel, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, came out in 1954.
Joan had three children and dedicated herself to her family. She converted to Judaism, though neither she nor Dannie were observant. Dannie once said that “Hitler made me more of a Jew than Moses”, and that was the tone of both their beliefs.
Dannie showed Joan everything he wrote and she became, as one friend put it, the “touchstone” for her husband’s writing. She also helped him practically. Once their young son, David, showed a friend a row of his father’s books. “My Mum typed all of those,” he said proudly.
Joan’s interest in art had been growing, and she enrolled as an adult student at the Courtauld Institute, where she took an MA in art history, under the supervision of Anita Brookner, in 1972. This led to her first book, The Art Galleries of Britain and Ireland: A Guide to Their Collections (1976), which included all public galleries with permanent collections, and drew particular attention to remarkable works “in the most surprising and unexpected places”.
In 1977 she edited My LSE, in which a large number of former students at the LSE recalled their time there. In her introduction, she wrote of her own time at the LSE in Cambridge.
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Her most prominent book was John Ruskin: The Passionate Moralist (1980). She had first heard his name when she walked to school along a street called Ruskin Drive. She became devoted to his writings, and wrote the book out of admiration for him. She dwelt particularly on concerns of his that she thought were still deeply relevant today — “the nature and function of art, and the dignity and indignity of work” — but she also brought out sensitively the tragedy of Ruskin’s life, his “catastrophic emotional failure”.
Subsequently she co-edited two anthologies with her husband. Voices in the Gallery (1986) was a Tate Gallery publication in which poems about paintings were printed side by side with reproductions of the paintings themselves, while other poems were matched with works with which they seemed to share a mood — such as Louis MacNeice’s poem Circus alongside Chagall’s Blue Circus. The Music Lover’s Literary Companion (1988) was an anthology of writing about music, including poetry.
Her last book was Letters from Wales (2000), an anthology of letters and diary entries concerning Wales from the 13th century to the 20th. Jan Morris reviewed it, observing that the things said about the Welsh by the English — “the besotted and the scornful, the gushing and the condescending” — had been exactly the same for 700 years.
Joan Abse was killed in a car crash when returning from Wales with her husband. Afterwards, the police family liaison officer had to ask a number of procedural questions, including whether she had had any military experience. In spite of their grief, Dannie and his children laughed, remembering how dedicated a pacifist and peace campaigner she had been all her life. She would have laughed loudest of all.
She will be remembered also through the many tender poems her husband wrote to her, especially those in the volume Tenants of the House.
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She is survived by her husband, a son and two daughters.
Joan Abse, writer, was born on September 11, 1926. She died on June 13, 2005, aged 78.