Bernardine Bishop

Her final two novels would be published posthumously, Hidden Knowledge in 2014 and The Street in 2015. While Unexpected Lessons In Love was praised for its deft and often humorous handling of difficult subject matter, Hidden Knowledge is a darker work. In it Bishop sets up a number of seemingly parallel narratives in order to explore, in her words, "The things people do not know about themselves, the things they cannot face."

Unexpected Lessons In Love was published in 2013, with the encouragement of Margaret Drabble, who described it as "one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in years" because it confronted "one of the last taboos of modern life" with a lightness of touch. It draws on Bishop’s life experiences in that the principal character, Cecilia, is a retired psychotherapist living with cancer, although Bishop herself said that she and Cecilia were not one and the same; her cat, Sidney, was the only real-life character in the novel.

The Street documents the intertwined lives of the residents of an ordinary suburban street, exploring the notion of community. "This lovely, surprising novel is the very last by Bernardine Bishop, who died in 2013," wrote Kate Saunders in The Times. "Like her novel Unexpected Lessons in Love, it is filled with life and optimism and a wicked sense of comedy. Characters find each other in ways that seem random, until it all falls into place at the deeply satisfying ending."

After completing what would be her final novel, The Street, Bishop was informed that her condition was terminal. "All the energy went out of me at that point and I felt dreadfully poor and sad and I haven’t written since," she said in a March 2013 interview. "I would have liked to have had a few more years. I would have liked a couple more novels."

Diagnosed with cancer of the colon in 2008, and subsequently forced to give up her psychotherapy work because of the illness, she reinvigorated her literary career by writing three novels, of which Unexpected Lessons In Love was the first. The book had only just been published when, having been informed that her condition was terminal, she decided to withdraw from chemotherapy and "turn her face towards Jerusalem". She died the following July.

Ill health, following her diagnosis with cancer of the colon in 2008, ultimately forced her to retire from her work as a therapist but led to a reflowering of her literary career. Believing herself to be in remission, she took up the pen and wrote three further novels before her condition returned and was pronounced terminal in 2012, ending, in her words, a period of "happy uncertainty" in her life.

In 1981 she married Bill Chambers, a maths lecturer at the University of London, and afterwards became a psychotherapist at the London Centre for Psychotheraphy. There she co-wrote a series of four books on psychotherapy published by Karnac in the Practice of Psychotherapy series, and wrote eight scientific papers, five of which were published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy. The papers, chiefly concerned with exploring psychoanalytic understandings through literature, attracted large audiences. She was, according to an appreciation published in the Journal after her death, an active contributor on all fronts, chairing committees with kindness and empathy. Her highly esteemed paper on Shakespeare’s Othello, Faith And Doubt In The Good Object, was selected for the celebratory edition of the British Journal’s papers.

Between her separation from Stephen Bishop in 1965 and the annulment of their marriage in 1967, Bishop underwent a period of tremendous stress, during which she sought relief through psychotherapy. Inspired by this, she decided to train as a psychotherapist herself, continuing to teach English part-time. She said of her time in the education profession that her greatest achievement had been to instil in the pupils, drawn from working class areas of north London, a love of Shakespeare.

Playing House, a more serious work concerning the sexual mores of two couples, followed in 1963 and demonstrated a growing interest in psychoanalysis, particularly Melanie Klein’s reading of object relations theory.

In 1961 Bishop married the pianist Stephen Bishop (now known as Stephen Kovacevich) and published her first novel. Perspectives, centred around the youthful staff of a fictitious London-based political magazine, was described by Guardian reviewer Isabel Quigly as “an extremely bright book, opening one's eyes to all sorts of aspects of youth”.

After graduating she became the youngest defence witness in the celebrated Lady Chatterley trial of 1960, when Penguin Books was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for the publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The last witness to be called, she appeared at the behest of Michael Rubinstein, a friend of the family and solicitor for Penguin Books, who believed her testimony would be sufficiently lucid and guileless to illustrate that reading the book had not corrupted her.

Bernardine Anna Livia Mary Bishop (née Wall; 16 August 1939 – 4 July 2013) was an English novelist, teacher and psychotherapist. Her first novel, Perspectives, was published by Hutchinson in 1961. During a half-century break between publishing her first two novels and her third, the 2013 Costa prize-nominated Unexpected Lessons In Love, she brought up a family, taught, and practised as a psychotherapist.