Novelist and critic best known for her book Patriarchal Attitudes
It was with the publication of her feminist polemic Patriarchal Attitudes in 1970 – the same year Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett's Sexual Politics came out – that Eva Figes's name sprang to prominence. Emphasising various aspects of women's oppression, Eva insisted that it is nurture rather than nature that has shaped secondary sex characteristics. Since women have had little to say in defining norms, the discussion centres on influential male thinkers, ranging from the writers of the Bible to Sigmund Freud. Most controversially, perhaps, she saw marriage as an anachronistic institution, perpetuating anachronistic attitudes. She herself was by then divorced, though she kept her husband's name throughout her life.
Patriarchal Attitudes remains her best known work and has had a huge influence on succeeding generations of women trying to find themselves. However, it was with her groundbreaking experimental novels, in which inner and outer aspects of life are woven into a luminous tapestry, that Eva, who has died aged 80, made her most significant contribution to 20th-century writing.
A year after she won the Guardian fiction prize for her second novel, Winter Journey (1967), in which she describes the last days of an old man, Janus, for whom "eternity splits into a second", she wrote in the Guardian: "People talk about writing for 'posterity' when work is not read or understood by more than a few. But posterity must and will take care of itself ... when I am at work I feel really aware of the present, of being alive here and now, of trying to apprehend existence, in however inadequate a fashion." Her own favourite was Light (1983), a short novel about a day in the life of Claude Monet. She felt if she were remembered for nothing else, that would do.
Eva was born in Berlin to prosperous secular Jewish parents, Peter and Irma Unger. During Kristallnacht in November 1938, her father was arrested and sent to Dachau concentration camp. After his release, he managed to escape to Britain in March 1939 with his wife and two children, Eva and her younger brother, Ernst. Seven-year-old Eva was bewildered by the change from a life of affluence to one of poverty in London. At her primary school, she felt conspicuously foreign, left out, labelled a "Jerry" after the outbreak of war. But by the time she got to Kingsbury grammar school, an avid reader with fluent English, she found approval and appreciation of her linguistic gifts.
Life at home was difficult: her father was in the army; her mother working, with little time for her daughter. "One afternoon just before the war ended," Eva wrote in the Observer in 1979, "my mother gave me nine pence and sent me off to the local cinema ... I sat alone in the dark and watched the newsreel of Belsen …" It was a deeply shocking experience which haunted her in nightmares for years. The seeds were sown for her third novel, Konek Landing (1969), about a Holocaust survivor who cannot come to terms with the present.
In 1953 she graduated from Queen Mary College, University of London, with a BA honours degree in English. She left determined to become a writer. In 1988 her old college, by then Queen Mary and Westfield, made her a fellow.
In 1955 she married John Figes. They had two children, Kate and Orlando, both now distinguished writers. The marriage was dissolved in 1962 and Eva brought up the children on her own, as well as writing and working for various publishers. She met Günter Grass when he was visiting London. Their short affair turned into a lasting friendship – one of his drawings, which hung in her sitting room, was a treasured possession. In May this year, she went to Germany with Orlando to visit Grass in Lübeck. Their affection for each other was undimmed.
Eva and I first met in London in the 1960s, taking part in a reading at Better Books organised by the publisher John Calder. Our friendship had its ups and downs over the decades. Eva was a driven person, impatient, whether waiting at a bus stop or for a call from her agent – or indeed for anything that was not happening quickly enough. In public and private, she inveighed against the stupidities of national and international politicians in general and the shortcomings of NHS hospitals in particular, of which she had an uncomfortable number of experiences.
"Hello, this is the other one" is how we would greet each other on the telephone, in tacit acknowledgment of our common background in Berlin, where countless parents during the 1920s and 1930s had called their daughters Eva. Altogether, over the years, her ambivalent attitude towards Germany had eased into a sense of feeling at home when she visited Berlin, by herself or with her family.
Her anger had become focused on Israel, where she had been only once, briefly. Her last published book, Journey to Nowhere (2008), begins with an account of the Unger family servant Edith, who had stayed in Berlin but eventually made her way to Israel, where she was miserable. Though one woman's failure to find happiness is scarcely an indictment of a whole country, the remainder of the book turns into a fierce anti-Israeli polemic. "I have always thought the creation of Israel was a catastrophic mistake, perhaps the worst of the 20th century. I have also, always, had doubts about Israel's right to exist."
In an acme of fury, she called German Jews who went to Palestine in the 1930s "Hitler Zionists". The strident, unbalanced tone of voice of Journey to Nowhere does not do Eva justice.
She was at her best in the previous book, Tales of Innocence and Experience (2003), exploring the bond between grandmother and granddaughter. Intertwined are the narrator's recollection of the fairytales she tells which take her back to her own childhood. Eva always spoke of her four granddaughters with enormous pride and deep affection, and her often strained features would become suffused with a glow. That is how I shall remember her.
She is survived by Kate, Orlando and her granddaughters.
• Eva Figes, writer, born 15 April 1932; died 28 August 2012