Virago modern classicsFictionObituary

Josephine Hart obituary

Poetry evangelist and author of Damage, the bestselling novel that was made into a film

Josephine Hart, who has died of cancer aged 69, was the author of the bestseller Damage (1990), a savage, shocking novel about passion and betrayal with the now famous line: "Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive." It was translated into 26 languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide, and in 1992 was made into a film, directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche.

Josephine was also an evangelist for poetry and claimed that poets shaped her life. She was born and raised in Mullingar, Co Westmeath, in Ireland, one of seven children, and educated at a Catholic boarding school. "I was a word child in a country of word children, where life was language before it was anything else. Poets were not only heroes, they were indeed the gods of language."

To the packed-out audiences who flocked in recent years to the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library in London, she would explain that "poetry, this trinity of sound, sense and sensibility, gives voice to experience in a way that no other literary art form can". In Catching Life By the Throat (2006), the edited book of poems that came out of these evenings, she wrote: "Poetry has never let me down. Without poetry, I would have found life less comprehensible, less bearable and infinitely less enjoyable."

Josephine came to London when she was 22. She joined Haymarket Publishing and eventually became one of its directors. In the late 1980s, she founded the Gallery Poets group to read aloud the works of WH Auden, Sylvia Plath, WB Yeats, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson et al, and she wanted leading actors for her "dead poets' society". Actors, and other artists, came in droves, first to Gallery Poets, later to her Poetry Hour: Juliet Stephenson, Edward Fox, Roger Moore, Harriet Walter, Bob Geldof, Harold Pinter, Eileen Atkins, Bono and Dominic West, to name but a handful.

TS Eliot was her favourite poet, and the production Let Us Go Then, You and I, a look at Eliot's life and works, which started off as a one-off event, turned into a six-week West End run – the first ever for a poetry programme – at the Lyric theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue in 1987. She went on to produce a number of West End plays, including the award-winning The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca, Noël Coward's The Vortex and The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch. In 1989 she also presented the series Books By My Bedside for Thames TV, for which she interviewed subjects including Derek Jarman, Clare Short and Jackie Collins about their current reading material.

After Damage, which told the story of a politician's obsession with his son's girlfriend, she went on to write another five novels: Sin (1992), Oblivion (1995), The Stillest Day (1998), The Reconstructionist (2001) and The Truth About Love (2009). Damage and Sin are to be reissued as Virago Modern Classics later this year, and Josephine felt that was a thrilling tribute. She loved the cover we at Virago proposed for Damage – a red rose bristling with thorns – and immediately I received a large bouquet of red roses from her, with a line from Marianne Moore: "Your thorns are the best part of you."

Having been gripped by the British Library poetry performances – not least those from Josephine herself – Virago first published the edited poetry collections Catching Life By the Throat and Words that Burn (2008). The Truth About Love, the first novel of hers that I published at Virago, was the only one that Josephine set in Ireland. Like all her books, it is about passion, but this time, misplaced passion, she believed, for a mythology that asks its people to keep dying for country and cause.

It is also about redemption and hinted at her own personal tragedies. By the age of 17, Josephine had witnessed the deaths of three siblings. "I have never actually written about it in all these years," she recalled, "except elliptically in this book. It was an extraordinary thing to know that such things can be survived. What happened, to be very cold about it, in our family, was strange, but looking back on the history of mankind and going back to all the great literature and the Greeks, grief and loss is part of the human condition."

In 1984 Josephine married Maurice (now Lord) Saatchi, the advertising magnate and political adviser, with whom she had a son, Edward. She had another son, Adam, from her first marriage, to Paul Buckleigh.

To me, Josephine's belief that literature can make a difference was inspiring. Though she was hugely sophisticated and glamorous, and no stranger to the benefits of working a room and making connections, the fact that so many of us were willingly beguiled by her was because of her passionate belief in art. There was something elemental about her.

Her novels show that she was not afraid of big, unruly, raw – savage, even – feelings, the real stuff of human relations. But she was far from being serious and high-minded at all times. She teased, loved banter, had a great warmth and laughed easily. She gave the world a special appreciation – for poetry and for words – believing that words could make it all worthwhile. She was right, but no small part of that was because she was the one delivering them. Josephine is survived by her husband and sons.

Josephine Hart, novelist and producer, born 1 March 1942; died 2 June 2011

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