Kay Dick

Kay Dick, writer: born London 29 July 1915; died Brighton, East Sussex 19 October 2001.

Kay Dick, writer: born London 29 July 1915; died Brighton, East Sussex 19 October 2001.

The writer Kay Dick had a remarkable career which began in 1915 with a stylishly unconventional début, her "baptism" in the Café Royal, where her mother had taken her after leaving Queen Charlotte's Hospital with 2s 6d in her purse, no husband and nowhere to go. The ceremony was conducted by Bohemian friends of her mother, Kate, and might be thought to have set Kay's character and destiny.

Innately glamorous and often impecunious, Kay was a maverick woman of letters from a more gracious age who cut a dashing figure with her striking good looks, crest of hair, eyeglass, cigarette holder and Jermyn Street shirts. She became Kay Dick when her mother married a Swiss businessman, who had her educated at a boarding school in Geneva and the Lycée Français de Londres.

Kay Dick listed her recreations as "friendship, gardening and walking the dog". Increasingly in the last few years, ill-health curtailed various pursuits but her, sometimes volatile, talent for friendship remained undiminished. Summer visitors to Brighton who came down by train were instructed to take the Volks Railway along the beach, where they would be met by Kay and an enthusiastic dog, a rescued stray, and treated to a splendid tea in her picture- and book-lined basement flat in a Regency terrace. Round the corner lived the novelist Kathleen Farrell, with whom Kay had shared 20 years in Great Missenden and Hampstead, north London, where their parties were legendary, and Kay spent much time caring for Kathleen, whose death in 1999 was a sad blow.

Although inevitably, by then, many old friends had died – and Kay Dick knew everybody in the literary world in her heyday – she was, as one friend remarked, "not only interested in people but in their children and grandchildren", and young people were drawn by her wit and sympathetic ear as well as by the force of her personality. She inspired devotion in the loyal coterie of friends who became her family, for she was quite alone in the world. Her books, the acclaimed Ivy and Stevie (1971) and Friends and Friendship (1974), revealing conversations with and reflections on fellow writers, attest to their esteem of her. (She took part in a documentary film about Stevie Smith in 1997.) A third non-fiction work, Pierrot: an investigation into commedia dell'arte (1960), demonstrates her identification with the character.

Always drawn to writers and artists, Kay Dick started work at the age of 20 in the mail publicity department of Foyles, and during the Second World War worked on the New Statesman. Later she was at the publisher George Newnes, and then rose to become the first woman director of an English publisher, P. S. King and Son. Thereafter she was assistant editor to John Brophy on the magazine John O'London's Weekly. Under the pseudonym Edward Lane she edited 13 issues of Heinemann's distinguished but short-lived magazine The Windmill, where among her triumphs was Malcolm Muggeridge's sterling "In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse".

She also edited seven books, including London's Hour: as seen through the eyes of the firefighters (1942), Late Joys at the Players Theatre (1943), Bizarre and Arabesque (1967: an anthology of Edgar Allan Poe) and Writers at Work (1972). In addition, she reviewed for The Times.

In 1977 her penultimate novel, They, was awarded the South East Arts Literature Prize. This surreal account of individuals caught up in a nightmare faceless bureaucracy was a departure from earlier works but touches on her thematic concern, "the necessary sincerity of humanist relationships". The Shelf (1984) depicts poignantly a love affair that ended with a suicide. Sunday (1962) is an affectionate portrait of her beautiful, impossible mother, who never did tell Kay the name of her real father but offered various romantic versions of him. Kay was convinced that she met him once at a railway station.

Her lifelong love of Paris, Geneva, Venice and, indeed, London is evident in her fiction, where names such as Weber's Café in Paris and Florian's in Venice conjure up images of the youthful, cosmopolitan Kay.

Her first novel, By the Lake, was published in 1949, followed by Young Man (1951), An Affair of Love (1953) and Solitaire (1958). Attracting excellent reviews, and very much of their time, they have an insouciant, sometimes raffish, charm and underlying seriousness which combine in timeless affirmations of life and love. There the difficulties of the writer's life are adumbrated with heartfelt humour. It was, however, for Kay Dick, a life that brought friendships with, among those too many to mention, Francis King, Olivia Manning, Isobel English and Neville Braybrooke, Pamela Hansford Johnson and C.P. Snow, Brigid Brophy and Michael Levey, Angus Wilson, Gillian Freeman, Muriel Spark and Nicholas Allan.

Kay Dick was a perfectionist, which meant that progress was often slow, and the vicissitudes of life, deteriorating health and the onset of old age meant that several projects were never realised. Nevertheless – fiercely intelligent and cultured, a campaigner for public lending right, generous in her praise of those she admired and an enemy of the treacherous and mediocre – she leaves an impressive body of work, and many friends whose lives will be poorer and duller for her passing.

Shena Mackay