Gillian Tindall

Gillian Tindall (born 4 May 1938)^[1] is a British writer; her mother, Ursula Orange, was also a writer. Among her better-known works are City of Gold: Biography of Bombay and Celestine: Voices from a French Village. Her novel Fly Away Home won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1972.

Since the 1970s she has lived in Kentish Town, in North London. Her book The Fields Beneath (1977) is about the history of the area.^[2]

Tindall's book The House by the Thames (2006) is about the house built at 49 Bankside in London in 1710 and the buildings that preceded it on the site. The house has served as a home for coal merchants, an office, a boarding house, a hangout for derelicts and once again as a private residence in the 1900s. It has been erroneously assumed to be where Sir Christopher Wren lived during the construction of St Paul's Cathedral, and other presumed residents of older buildings on the site include Catherine of Aragon and William Shakespeare.

Another of Tindall's works, "The Journey of Martin Nadaud. A Life And Turbulent Times," (1999, St. Martin's Press, 10 August 2000 - 320 pages) is a miniaturist history that reconstructs the life and voyage of an ordinary French man from Creuse in the Limousin region, a master stonemason-builder, who became a little known French political figure, revolutionary and a Member of the French Parliament. Martin Nadaud (1815-1898), was exiled from France after the failure of the 1848 Revolution, and lived for eighteen years in England, where he became also a schoolmaster at Wimbledon, in a school directed by John Brackenbury and at that time preparatory to the military. (Later on it became the Jesuit Wimbledon College). In his period of schoolmastership at Wimbledon, to hide his real identity, Nadaud assumed the name of Henri Geo. Martin. In 1870 Martin Nadaud made his final triumphant return to his homeland France. Publicly, his life was finally crowned with success. But on a private level Nadaud suffered griefs and losses that would leave lasting marks on the man. Examining family letters and personal papers that have lain unread for the last hundred years, Gillian Tindall has constructed a moving and compelling portrait of a hard working socialist and republican and his turbulent times in France and England.

Bibliography

Novels

• No Name in the Street (1959)
• The Water and the Sound (1961)
• The Edge of the Paper (1963)
• The Youngest (1967)
• Someone Else (1969)
• Fly Away Home (1971)
• The Traveller and His Child (1975)
• The Intruder (1979)
• Looking Forward (1983)
• To the City (1987)
• Give Them All My Love (1989)
• Spirit Weddings (1992)

Short stories

• Dances of Death (1973)
• The China Egg and Other Stories (1981)
• Journey of a Lifetime (1990)

Biography

• The Born Exile: George Gissing (1974)

Non-fiction

• A Handbook on Witchcraft (1965, Castle Books, ASIN B000JG9ESE)
• Rosamond Lehmann: An Appreciation (1985, Chatto & Windus, ISBN 978-0701127060)
• Countries of the Mind: The Meaning of Place to Writers (New edition 2011, Faber & Faber, ISBN 978-0571260362)
• City of Gold: The Biography of Bombay (1992, Penguin Books Ltd. Travel Library, ISBN 978-0140095005)
• Célestine: Voices From a French Village (1997, Henry Holt & Co., ISBN 978-0805051773)
• The Journey of Martin Nadaud (1999, St Martin's Press, ISBN 978-0312261856)
• The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in reality and imagination (2003, Pimlico, ISBN 978-0712667579)
• The House By The Thames: And The People Who Lived There (2006, Pimlico, ISBN 978-1844130948)
• Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, A Few Lives (2009, Chatto & Windus, ISBN 978-0701181024)
• The Fields Beneath (1977) (New edition 2011, Eland Press, ISBN 978-1906011482)
• Three Houses, Many Lives (2012, Chatto & Windus, ISBN 978-0701185183)

References

1. "Weekend birthdays", The Guardian, p. 53, 4 May 2014
2. Emms, Stephen (3 July 2013). "Wednesday Picture: Gillian Tindall's Kentish Town Hideaway". Kentishtowner.