Joy Melville was a journalist, biographer and that rarity, a woman who wrote for Punch magazine. She was born Joy Eva Melville, one of three children, to a Guyanese father and an English mother, in 1936, and it was chance that led her, as a young woman, to work in the Bouverie St offices of Punch. Surrounded by the wittiest and most imaginative humorists of the day, she flourished in an atmosphere congenial to her own sense of fun.
She began to contribute pieces, initially under a pseudonym, and went on to write for the magazine, the first woman on the staff to do so. That only male contributors were, at that time, allowed to sit on the weekly Punch Table sowed the early seeds of her feminism.
From Punch she went on to New Society magazine in the 1970s. As production editor in the days of hot-metal printing, she learnt about the complexities of magazine layout and the typesetting skills of compositors. She proved to be a brilliant editor and sub-editor. Her experience there laid the foundations for her own precision and economy of style. After New Society she went freelance, contributing regularly to The Guardian, the Evening Standard and The Sunday Times. Always professional in meeting deadlines, she was intrepid whether clambering down Cornish tin mines, learning to pilot an aeroplane or attending a sacrificial Kali Mai ceremony in the Guyanese bush; she would do anything for a good story.
The subjects of her early books ranged from mental health to unemployment. She travelled to Africa, conducting research for a book, Lost Children of the Empire, which studied the effects on children forcibly deported from Britain in the 1950s. She was modest about her part in bringing about the government’s apology to them.
Her literary talent blossomed when she became a biographer. She loved the theatre, and her first biography was of the actress Ellen Terry and her daughter Edie. This was followed by The Mother of Oscar, the life of Wilde’s mother Jane, the revolutionary poetess who wrote under the pen name Speranza, which was adapted for BBC radio. After that came a BBC radio programme about the theatre manager and director Lilian Baylis, and a biography of Julia Margaret Cameron, the Victorian photographer. Melville returned to her original subject and published a singular biography of Ellen Terry before completing the work that proved to be her last, a life of the ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev.
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A distaste for the celebrity catwalk meant that her work was undervalued. However, when invited to talk at Harvard, the National Theatre, the PEN club and the National Portrait Gallery, she spoke fluently and entertainingly, without notes, about her subjects.
She was a great letter writer and enjoyed corresponding with her many friends. Having had a peripatetic education — she attended 14 schools — she had no university degree until the last decade of her life when she was accepted on to an MA course at Birkbeck College, University of London, from which she graduated with distinction.
Despite failing eyesight she began to draw. The drawings were marvellous, naive, lively notebook sketches from observations in cafés and street scenes which she painted in later.
Her character was a mix of the delicate and the tough; the mercurial and the stoic. She loved to dress up for special occasions but was never pretentious and displayed an enthusiastic gaiety and love of life.
Joy Melville, journalist and biographer, was born on May 21, l936. She died of complications after minor surgery on January 30, 2011, aged 74