- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 14 2001 16.40 GMT
Lorna Sage, who died last week, was one of the final links to some of the golden years of The Observer's literary pages under the editorship of Terence Kilmartin. A lifelong academic, with a string of influential critical books on women's writing and important studies of both Doris Lessing (1983) and Angela Carter (1994), she brought to her book reviewing a writer's sensibility and a perceptive generosity that made an important and lasting contribution to the tone of our books pages. First novelists who were lucky enough to receive one of her reviews found their work exposed to a searching literary intelligence of great force and integrity.
Former literary editor Tim Adams remembers that: 'In her reviews Lorna achieved a rare and highly personal admixture of rigour and surprise; each one of her sentences, peculiar constructs of this beady individual attention, bore the unmistakable fingerprint of her unique critical DNA.' Another former colleague, Kate Kellaway, who commissioned much of Lorna's work, writes: 'She had wonderful poise and heart, a light touch and a wry wit. She could make an ordinary moment feel suddenly convivial, as though a party might suddenly grow out of her presence. And she was incapable of writing a dull word about anything.'
I met her shortly after I joined The Observer to discuss the renewal of her reviewing, a meeting notable for the intervention of much lager and many cigarettes. Sadly, a sabbatical in Florence and the travails of ill-health prevented a real collaboration. For her readers, however, it was not a wasted year. She completed the editing of her landmark Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English (1999) and, more importantly, wrote her prize-winning Bad Blood, a brilliant and characteristically fearless investigation of her family's dark, Dickensian secrets.
The Observer's review of this remarkable book identified Lorna Sage as 'the odd one out - the teenager who loves Latin and Elvis; the university student with the husband and baby daughter... determined to break the rules and get away with it.'
Bad Blood has now become hot favourite to win this year's Whitbread Prize. Lorna Sage, a doughty veteran of English literary life, would have been the first to appreciate the irony.
