Pauline Neville, who has died aged 91, was one of those novelists who inspired something close to adoration in her regular readers but who never won a big award. She was greatly admired, too, by fellow writers, who recognised her seriousness of purpose and her honesty. Nothing in her work was ever there for cheap effect.
Neville grew up in the lowlands of Scotland between the two world wars, and retraced these years in her first and best-known work, In My Father’s House (1969). It tells of the relationship of a clergyman to his parish, of children growing up in rural surroundings, and of the binding influence of the family dog. Its follow-up, Peggy (1999), which was shortlisted for the JR Ackerley prize, explored the author’s personal connections with Northern Ireland, where she often spent family holidays, through an account of two cousins spending time there against the ever-present background of political restlessness.
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