Josephine Hart
Josephine Hart was an Irish novelist and theater producer, born in 1942 in Mullingar, County Westmeath, Ireland. Educated at a convent boarding school and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she later moved to London in the early 1970s and worked in publishing. Hart's personal life included two marriages: first to Paul Buckley, with whom she had a son, and later to Lord Maurice Saatchi. Her literary career began with her first novel, *Damage: A Novel*, which became a bestseller and was adapted into a film. Hart’s subsequent works, such as *Sin* and *Oblivion*, continued to explore themes of obsession, often with dark and complex narratives. Despite her popularity, critical reception of her novels has been mixed. Beyond writing, Hart was also active in promoting poetry through initiatives like the Gallery Poets and the West End Poetry Hour at the British Library, showcasing significant poets’ works. Hart's contributions to literature and theater reflect a deep engagement with complex human emotions and relationships.
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Josephine Hart
Author
- Born: March 1, 1942
- Birthplace: Mullingar, County Westmeath, Ireland
- Died: June 2, 2011
Biography
Josephine Hart was born in 1942 in Mullingar, County Westmeath, Ireland, and was educated at a convent boarding school and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. As a teenager, Hart was enamored of the work of Irish writer Iris Murdoch (1919-1999), and the two maintained a friendship and correspondence from 1984 until Murdoch’s death.
In the early 1970’s, Hart moved to London, where she worked at Haymarket Publishing, first in sales, later as publishing director. She married publishing executive Paul Buckley in 1972, and bore a son, Adam, before their 1983 divorce. Hart later remarried, to Lord Maurice Saatchi—former chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, cofounder of the international advertising agencies Saatchi and Saatchi and M. and C. Saatchi, and one of the United Kingdom’s richest men—and gave birth to a second son, Edward.
Hart worked for several publishers, then started producing theater performances in the West End of London. Her successful productions included Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba (which won the Evening Standard Award), Noël Coward’s The Vortex, and Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince. As a producer, she began writing, something she had long been interested in doing, and moved naturally towards the novel form.
Hart’s first novel, Damage: A Novel, was a runaway best seller (with more than one million copies sold), praised for its minimalist prose, provocative subject matter, and dark tone. The story of a middle-aged member of the British Parliament who, with tragic consequences, becomes obsessed with his son’s attractive, emotionally damaged fiancée, the novel was produced as a film in 1992, directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. Hart continued with the theme of obsession in her next novel, Sin: A Novel, a tragedy of lust, cruelty, and betrayal, in which Ruth, a beautiful woman, is possessed by terrible envy.
Likewise, Hart’s third novel, Oblivion, also concerns obsession, this time with death: Laura Bolton is gone, but not forgotten. Her grief-stricken mother has erected a shrine to Laura’s memory, and her widowed husband, the journalist Andrew, is haunted by Laura’s presence even as he pursues relationships with other women, finding himself unable to move on with his life. The Stillest Day, set at the turn of the twentieth century, revolves around artist-teacher Bethesda Barnet’s obsession with painting images of a married man, Matthew Pearson.The Reconstructionist, like its predecessors, features a cool narrator—Jack, a divorced psychiatrist—who, in the course of reconstructing other peoples’ lives, is forced to examine his own, in the process revealing the psychological reasons behind his failed marriage and his unrequited feelings for his sister, Kate.
Despite the popularity of her work—the body of which has received lukewarm critical approval, due to a mannered, staccato style; simplistic characters; and thin plots—Josephine Hart’s career as a novelist is probably nearing its end; the author herself has admitted she has a finite number of stories to tell. As compensation, Hart founded the Gallery Poets and West End Poetry Hour, which presents the works of major poets at the British Library, read by actors such as Judy Dench, Edward Fox, and Joe Fiennes. She also presented Thames Television’s Books by My Bedside.