Writer and psychotherapist whose successful novel Unexpected Lessons in Love was published this year
Bernardine Bishop, who has died aged 73, made her mark as a novelist with Unexpected Lessons in Love, published in January. In the half century since the appearance of two earlier works, she had brought up a family, taught and practised as a psychotherapist. For her final book, she was thus able to draw on a lifetime's worth of experiences, many of them painful.
Unexpected Lessons in Love is autobiographical in that its central character is a retired psychotherapist coping with anal cancer and a colostomy, discussed in a brave degree of detail. As a result, it breaks new ground by reaching out to a constituency of readers unaccustomed to having their story told.
The starting point is the author's preoccupation with her cancer and her longing to be cured of it. A love story develops: among other things, it involves the kidnapping of a war reporter, the discovery of an abandoned baby and the kindness of a domestic cat. Bernardine's friend Margaret Drabble found the whole to be "frank, courageous and entertaining".
Bernardine was born in London to Barbara Wall, a novelist and translator, and her husband, Bernard, who wrote on Italian and Spanish history and culture. The poet and suffragist Alice Meynell was a great-grandmother on her mother's side. From the Convent of Our Lady of Sion school, Notting Hill, west London, Bernardine went to Newnham College, Cambridge, where her lecturers in English included CS Lewis, EM Forster and FR Leavis.
She graduated in 1960, and in October that year appeared as the final and youngest witness in support of the literary merit of DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, in a court case brought under the new Obscene Publications Act. Michael Rubinstein, solicitor for the publishers Penguin, was a friend of her father, who persuaded her to take the stand, judging correctly how lucid and guileless her evidence would be. It became clear that reading the book had not corrupted her.
In 1961 she married the pianist Stephen Bishop, now known as Stephen Kovacevich. They had two sons, Matt, a director of the McLaren Formula One team, and Foff (Francis), a West Sussex fireman. They divorced in 1967, and she taught English at a succession of inner London comprehensives.
In 1981 she married Bill Chambers, a maths lecturer at London University. Soon afterwards she became a psychotherapist at the London Centre for Psychotherapy.
Her first novel, Perspectives (1961), now seems very dated. The young staff of a fictitious political magazine struggle to keep it afloat while not falling out with one another. It is saved by "a queer MP" whose interest in the investment is sustained by one of the journalists pretending to be "a colourful young man". The Guardian reviewer Isabel Quigly called it "an extremely bright book, opening one's eyes to all sorts of aspects of youth".
Playing House (1963) is more serious, less camp, and again very much of its time. It recounts the lives of two couples, who scrutinise their bed-hopping antics from a psychoanalytical point of view that reveals the interest Bernardine had developed in Melanie Klein's version of object relations theory, a school of thought to which she would loosely adhere during her career as a psychotherapist.
In the mid-1960s, she appeared on BBC television's literary quiz show Take It Or Leave It, presented by Robert Robinson. She more than held her own among her predominantly older, male fellow panellists, such as Anthony Burgess and John Betjeman.
I knew Bernardine for more than 25 years, and the purity of her thought and the precision of her phrase-making, whether in conversation or in writing, were matchless. She was kind, funny and self-deprecating, too.
She is survived by Bill and her sons.
• Bernardine Anna Livia Mary Bishop, novelist and psychotherapist, born 16 August 1939; died 4 July 2013