Violet Dias Lannoy

Lannoy was a Christian in Goa, and of a relatively low caste; she challenged Indian associations with caste, but was critical of Catholicism as well for excluding non-Christians from redemption. Her first husband was Behram Warden; her second husband, Richard Lannoy, was a British photographer and writer, author of The Speaking Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society (Oxford UP, 1971). She died in 1973 in St Albans, England, of a heart attack. When she died, her novel Pears from the Willow Tree was unpublished, as were some short stories; the novel was finally published by Three Continents Press in 1989, edited by C. L. Innes, who had become interested after hearing Richard Lannoy read a paper on his wife's life and work.

Her second husband, Richard Lannoy, identified a number of distinct stages in the development of the novel. Inexperienced in creative writing, she began the draft when she and Lannoy were living in North India in the late 1950s; she taught at a school where most of her colleagues were Hindu, and she, a Goan Catholic, was regarded as an outsider. Her first forays into creative writing were influenced by Allen Ginsberg's Howl and John Berger's Painter of Our Time. The Lannoys moved around, and she spent a year in London, and read especially Isaac Babel deeply (and an essay by Lionel Trilling on Babel), and Babel's influence shows in Lannoy's "disturbing revelation of darker moral issues". She sent this draft to Richard Wright, and his positive comments made her decide to move to Paris, where she and her husband lived for the next few years. She was invited to Wright's farm, where the novel was discussed, and he was helping her look for a publisher, but his death was a crushing blow for her hopes, and Ellen Wright, Richard Wright's widow and literary agent for Simone de Beauvoir, could not find her a publisher. Now influenced by Elias Canetti and Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor", she rewrote much of the novel, recasting some of the characters and introducing the betrayal of all-too optimistic ideals. A final polishing occurred in 1972, when the Lannoys had returned to Goa, but her death prevented publication.

Violet Dias Lannoy (1925–1973) was a teacher and writer. Born in Mozambique to parents from Goa, India, she taught in schools and advised on educational policy all around the world. Lannoy, called "the lost Goan/Indian/African novelist" by critic and writer Peter Nazareth, wrote Pears from the Willow Tree, a posthumously published novel, besides short stories.