Early life Beryl Margaret Bainbridge was born in Liverpool's
Allerton suburb on 21 November 1932, the daughter of Winifred Baines and Richard Bainbridge. She grew up in the nearby town of
Formby. Although she often gave her date of birth as 21 November 1934, she was born in 1932 and her birth was registered in the first quarter of 1933. When German former prisoner of war Harry Arno Franz wrote to her in November 1947, he mentioned her 15th birthday. Bainbridge enjoyed writing, and by the age of 10 she was keeping a diary. She then went on to study at Cone-Ripman School in
Tring (now the
Tring Park School for the Performing Arts), where she found she was good at history, English, and art. The summer she left school, she fell in love with former German prisoner of war Harry Arno Franz who was waiting to be repatriated. For the next six years, the couple corresponded and tried to get permission for him to return to Britain so that they could marry, but permission was denied and the relationship ended in 1953. It was eventually published in 1972, four years after her third novel (
Another Part of the Wood). Her second and third novels were published (1967/68) and were received well by critics although they failed to earn much money. She wrote and published seven more novels during the 1970s, of which the fifth,
Injury Time, was awarded the
Whitbread prize for best novel in 1977. In the late 1970s, she wrote a screenplay based on her novel
Sweet William.
The resulting film, starring
Sam Waterston, was released in 1980. From 1980 onwards, eight more novels appeared. The 1989 novel,
An Awfully Big Adventure, was adapted into
a film in 1995, starring
Alan Rickman and
Hugh Grant. In the 1990s, Bainbridge turned to historical fiction. These novels continued to be popular with critics, but this time, were also commercially successful. From the 1990s, Bainbridge also served as a theatre critic for the monthly magazine
The Oldie. Her reviews rarely contained negative content, and were usually published after the play had closed. was edited for publication by Brendan King, whose biography
Beryl Bainbridge: Love by All Sorts of Means was published in September 2016. ==Death==