Ruth Rendell

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Standard Name: Rendell, Ruth
Birth Name: Ruth Barbara Graseman
Married Name: Ruth Barbara Rendell
Titled: Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh
Pseudonym: Barbara Vine
RR established herself as a leading crime novelist of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To the intricacies of plot characteristic of the genre, she adds a capacity to scare her readers, and a sophisticated focus on the psychological and emotional aspects of criminal minds and the minds of those committed to the notion of justice. She is also attentive to contemporary English life and keenly interested in books and language, which feature importantly in her fictional worlds. She published sixty novels and was translated into twenty-five languages.
Colour photograph of Ruth Rendell, seated at a table with a microphone and a glass of water. She is wearing a fawn jacket, white shirt, and brown trousers. Her is short and blonde.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Dedications Jeanette Winterson
JW published a novel titled The Gap in Time. The Winter's Tale Retold: first in the Hogarth Shakespeare series in which novelists are commissioned to retell a Shakespearean plot. She dedicated it to the...
Friends, Associates Jeanette Winterson
JW is a close friend of crime writer Ruth Rendell , from whom she borrows a cottage in Essex every autumn to go and spend time writing. Other friends speak of JW as a person...
Intertextuality and Influence Josephine Tey
Later crime writer Val McDermid discovered this novel, her first by Tey, as a revelation: modern, nuanced, unformulaic, it was unlike its contemporaries but in tune with some successors, like Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell
Intertextuality and Influence Josephine Tey
Ruth Rendell uses it as a point of reference in her crime novel Harm Done, 1999. Her investigator, Wexford, suggests to a confident young woman claiming to have been kidnapped that she in turn...
Literary responses Pat Barker
Another World was praised by several of PB 's fellow-novelists. Ruth Rendell thought it the most moving thing Barker had ever done; P. D. James called it subtle and beautifully written; Michele Roberts found...
Literary responses Anita Brookner
Ruth Rendell thought this AB 's best novel to date, and Susan Hill thought it her best since Hotel du Lac. Rendell called it almost unbearably moving; Hill said it marks an advance...
Literary responses Sue Townsend
Ruth Rendell called this book the funniest thing in print since Adrian Mole.
qtd. in
Blackwell’s Online Bookshop. http://Bookshop.Blackwell.co.uk.
politics Monica Furlong
MF founded the Group for Rescinding the Act of Synod or GRAS at an evening meeting held in the Moses Room of the House of Lords , Westminster, and hosted by novelist Ruth Rendell
Publishing Anthony Trollope
Doctor Thorne, the third novel in the series, was published by Smith Elder in 1858.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
191
Ruth Rendell wrote an introduction to a Penguin edition in 1991. The fourth in the series, Framley Parsonage...
Reception Ford Madox Ford
Writers as different as Ruth Rendell and A. S. Byatt belong to the Ford Madox Ford Society , founded in 1997.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Textual Features Antonia Fraser
In her detective-story guise, Fraser sees herself as part of a women's tradition in the genre, and names as influences a number of writers who are known for interest in human psychology and a high...
Textual Features P. D. James
The result, as Ashby noted, falls somewhere between the cosy settings of Agatha Christie 's Miss Marples novels and the gritty urban dystopias of contemporaries like Ruth Rendell . PDJ 's imagined worlds tend to...
Textual Production Anne Finch
One passage from a long Pindaric ode entitled All is Vanity (present in Finch's early octavo ms and in her printed collection) has broken loose and achieved a life of its own. Whereas the entire...
Textual Production Jeanette Winterson
Her contributors included Ali Smith on Beethoven 's Fidelio, Anne Enright on Dvorak 's Rusalka, Jackie Kay on Janacek 's The Makropulos Case, Joanna Trollope on Donizetti 's L'Elisir d'Amore, Kate Atkinson
Textual Production Joanna Trollope
Other contributors to the collection included Ruth Rendell , Maeve Binchy , and Richard Branson . Several companies gave their services without payment for the production of these books, aimed at beginning readers or hesitant readers.
Trollope, Joanna. The Book Boy. Bloomsbury, 2006.
end pages

Timeline

1 January 1753: According to her own story, Elizabeth Canning,...

National or international item

1 January 1753

According to her own story, Elizabeth Canning , a maidservant, was abducted, after which she was imprisoned for days.
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
23 (1752): 107-9

9 March 1950: Timothy Evans, a van-driver in his early...

Building item

9 March 1950

Timothy Evans , a van-driver in his early twenties, was hanged for the murders of his wife and baby daughter, who were more likely killed by the family's landlord, John Reginald Halliday Christie .
“Timonthy Evans and John Christie”. Stephen’s Study Room: British Military & Criminal History in the period 1900 to 1999.

Texts

Rendell, Ruth. A Dark-Adapted Eye. Viking, 1985.
Rendell, Ruth. A Demon in My View. Hutchinson, 1976.
Rendell, Ruth. A Fatal Inversion. Viking, 1987.
Rendell, Ruth. A Guilty Thing Surprised. Hutchinson, 1970.
Rendell, Ruth. A Judgement in Stone. Hutchinson, 1977.
Rendell, Ruth. A New Lease of Death. Doubleday, 1967.
Rendell, Ruth. A Sleeping Life. Hutchinson, 1978.
Rendell, Ruth. A Spot of Folly. Profile Books, 2017.
Rendell, Ruth. An Unkindness of Ravens. Hutchinson, 1985.
Rendell, Ruth. Asta’s Book. Viking, 1993.
Rendell, Ruth. Dark Corners. Cornerstone Hutchinson, 2015.
Rendell, Ruth. End in Tears. Hutchinson, 2005.
Rendell, Ruth. From Doon with Death. John Long, 1964.
Rendell, Ruth. Gallowglass. 1st ed., Harmony Books, 1990.
Rendell, Ruth. Going Wrong. Hutchinson, 1990.
Rendell, Ruth. Grasshopper. Viking, 2000.
Rendell, Ruth. Harm Done. Double Day, 1999.
Rendell, Ruth. Harm Done. Arrow Books, 2000.
Rendell, Ruth. Heartstones. Hutchinson, 1987.
Rendell, Ruth. King Solomon’s Carpet. Viking, 1991.
Rendell, Ruth. Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter. Hutchinson, 1992.
Rendell, Ruth. Live Flesh. Hutchinson, 1986.
Rendell, Ruth. Master of the Moor. Hutchinson, 1982.
Rendell, Ruth. Murder Being Once Done. Hutchinson, 1972.
Rendell, Ruth. No More Dying Then. Hutchinson, 1971.