Rachel Stainer was born in
Islington, London. After her father Tom died in the
First World War, the family moved to
Newbury, Berkshire. After an "impulsive and unsuccessful wartime liaison", in 1947 she moved to
Vienna, Austria, to work with the
Four Power Commission, and married the journalist
Antony Terry. Terry was German correspondent for
The Sunday Times, Stainer never returned to England, living in
Berlin,
Bonn and
Trieste before returning to Vienna. In 1956,
Cyril Ray helped secure her a job as Central and Eastern Europe Correspondent for
The Spectator, making a plea that she needed the money. Writing as Sarah Gainham (the name of her maternal great-grandmother), she reported on Germany and the German-speaking parts of Central Europe until 1966. She soon published her first novel,
Time Right Deadly (1956), a semi-autobiographical account of an unsuccessful affair. Here Gainham drew on her own knowledge of
Cold War spies and intrigues: Terry, hired to
The Sunday Times by
Ian Fleming, may have been an MI6 agent, and Gainham herself apparently researched a document 'East-West Routes for Agents', commissioned by Fleming, on how to gain access to
West Berlin from
East Berlin. In 1964, her marriage to Terry was dissolved, and she married
Kenneth Ames, Central European correspondent of
The Economist. Gainham's 1967 book
Night Falls on the City, a tale of love and betrayal set in wartime Vienna, achieved significant commercial success: it topped the
New York Times bestseller list for several months, and was widely translated. It was the first novel of a trilogy, completed by
A Place in the Country (1969) and
Private Worlds (1971), and gave her financial security. In 1975, Ames committed suicide, leaving Gainham alone in later life. In 1976, she moved from Vienna to a small house in
Petronell-Carnuntum, on the banks of the
Danube, and became a somewhat eccentric recluse. Her last novel was the heavily autobiographical but unsuccessful
The Tiger, Life (1983). In 1984, she was made a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Literature.
A Discursive Essay on the Presentation of Recent History in England was privately published in 1999. ==Works==