Peter Rushforth
Peter Rushforth was an English author and educator, born on February 15, 1945, in Gateshead, County Durham, and raised in Leeds. He pursued literature studies at Hull University and later obtained a teaching certification from the University of Nottingham. Rushforth dedicated over twenty-five years to teaching at the Friends School in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, where he became head of the English department. His first novel, *Kindergarten*, published in 1979, was inspired by historical letters from Jewish parents seeking refuge for their children during the rise of Nazi Germany. This work was praised for its innovative narrative and moral depth, earning the prestigious Hawthornden Prize.
In 1994, after being inspired by Puccini's opera *Madama Butterfly*, Rushforth began crafting a series of novels centered around its characters. His second novel, *Pinkerton's Sister*, published after his retirement from teaching, is an extensive interior monologue set in early 20th-century New York. Tragically, Rushforth passed away unexpectedly in 2005 while hiking. His literary legacy includes a commitment to exploring complex themes of history, morality, and human experience, with criticism highlighting his formal inventiveness and ability to provoke thought.
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Peter Rushforth
Author
- Born: February 15, 1945
- Birthplace: Blackhill, County Durham, England
- Died: September 25, 2005
- Place of death: North Yorkshire, England
Biography
Peter Rushforth was born February 15, 1945, in Gateshead, County Durham, England, and was raised in Leeds. He completed his undergraduate work in literature at Hull University. Drawn by a love of the classroom and the challenge of presenting literature, he completed a teacher’s certification from the University of Nottingham in 1967. After a brief stint in public school, he accepted a position at the Quaker-run Friends School in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, where he would remain for more than twenty-five years. A charismatic and inventive teacher, he devoted enormous time to the classroom, eventually serving as head of the English department from 1980 until his retirement in 1995.
When Rushforth came upon a collection of heartbreaking letters sent to the school’s former headmaster from Jewish parents in Europe begging the school to accept their children to keep them safe from the emerging threat of Hitler’s regime, Rushforth was so profoundly moved that he began what would become his first novel, 1979’s Kindergarten. Set in contemporary England, in it, a quiet precocious teenager, whose mother had recently been killed in a terrorist attack in Rome, finds a similar cache of letters and in the process of coming to grips with the implications of their poignant pleas learns much about his own Jewish ancestry and about the nature of evil. Drawing upon classic fairy tales that involve children placed in precarious positions (most notably Hansel and Gretel), the narrative was immediately hailed not only for its formal inventiveness but more for the moral intensity of its most original treatment of the Holocaust. It was awarded the coveted Hawthornden Prize, the oldest literary prize in the United Kingdom.
Rushforth, however, returned to what he loved most: the classroom. After viewing a performance of Puccini’s wrenching opera Madama Butterfly, Rushforth began to conceive of a series of novels that would draw out the lives of Puccini’s characters. In 1994, he took a sabbatical leave to Brazil where he could begin to write without distractions. Convinced when he returned of the value of the enterprise, he retired from teaching and worked for the next nine years on drafting Pinkerton’s Sister. Set in New York at the turn of the twentieth century (its historic period meticulously rendered), the novel, at more than seven hundred pages, was an exhaustive and often dense interior monologue of a single day in the life of the fictitious sister of Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton (the heartless lover who abandons Madame Butterfly), an accomplished, if eccentric, socialite with an embracing intelligence and cutting wit. The book was critically hailed as a contemporary Ulysses. By the time of its publication, Rushforth had drafted parts of what he now conceived as an ambitious five-novel series. On a hiking expedition in the Yorkshire Moors on September 25, 2005, Rushforth died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack. The second volume, A Dead Language (the story of the haunted Pinkerton himself), was published posthumously in 2006.
It is of course difficult to assess a writer whose defining project was left uncompleted. With a daring sense of narrative form, a careful eye for historic fiction, and a natural feel for the epic dimension of literature, Rushforth left works of remarkable moral insight and formal audacity.