The writer Joan Brady, who has died aged 84, was the first woman to win the Whitbread book of the year award, in 1993, for her novel Theory of War, but she probably would not have done so if she had heeded the advice of her husband, the novelist Dexter Masters, who edited an early draft of the book. “You see, I think he didn’t want people to think badly of me, so he cut all the modern sections, thinking they would embarrass me,” Brady said. After his death in 1989, she reinstated the sections that he had cut: “Without them the book wouldn’t have worked. Without them it loses its driving force.”
Theory of War earned not only awards, but comparisons with William Golding, Angela Carter and John Steinbeck. Brady’s afterword explained the story’s genesis: “My grandfather was a slave. This isn’t an uncommon claim for an American to make if the American is black. But I’m not black, I’m white. My grandfather was white, too. And he was sold into slavery not in some barbaric third world country; he was sold in the United States of America. A midwestern tobacco farmer bought him for $15 when he was four years old. Not many people know about such sales, though they were common just after the civil war.”
