Bernice Rubens was a Welsh novelist of Jewish immigrant descent who became, in 1970, the first woman and still the only Welsh writer to win the Booker Prize. She published more than twenty novels over four decades, along with documentary films and a posthumous memoir. Her work mixed dark humour with close observation of family life, mental breakdown, isolation and Jewish identity. She wrote with a plain, precise style that could turn suddenly grotesque or tender.
She was born Bernice Ruth Reuben on 26 July 1923 at 9 Glossop Terrace in Splott, Cardiff, though she later gave the year as 1928 and many obituaries followed that date. She was the third of four children of Eli Harold Reuben, a Lithuanian Jew, and Dorothy Cohen, whose family had fled Poland. Eli left Europe around 1900 hoping to reach New York. A ticket tout cheated him; the ship put him off at Cardiff. He stayed, worked as a credit draper or tallyman selling clothes on weekly payments to miners in the valleys, and married Dorothy. The household was poor, Orthodox and musical. Eli had brought a violin from Latvia. The two sons, Harold and Cyril, and the elder daughter Beryl all became professional musicians. Harold was a child prodigy pianist whose career was cut short by illness. Cyril played violin in the London Symphony Orchestra. Bernice learned piano and later cello but never reached their standard. She said she learned instead how to listen, a skill she later used as a novelist.
She attended Roath Park and Cardiff High School for Girls, then read English at University College, Cardiff, graduating in 1947. She later called the degree a “major folly,” saying immersion in the nineteenth-century English novel was no great help to a would-be writer. After a brief spell teaching English at a boys’ grammar school in Birmingham, she moved to London. In 1947 she married Rudolf Nassauer, a wine merchant and writer from an assimilated German-Jewish family. They had two daughters, Sharon and Rebecca. The marriage lasted more than twenty years but ended in divorce around 1969 after his infidelity; they remained in contact until his death.
In the 1950s Rubens worked as a documentary film writer and director, often for the United Nations and other agencies. She made films about disability, stress, and the lives of women in rural development in Asia and Africa. One film, Stress, won an American Blue Ribbon award. She began writing fiction when her daughters started nursery school, treating it at first as a practical use of spare time and a form of therapy. Her first novel, Set on Edge, appeared in 1960. It drew on her maternal grandmother’s life and already showed the mixture of family pressure, Jewish particularity and dark comedy that marked much of her work.
Madame Sousatzka (1962) followed. It concerned an eccentric piano teacher and a gifted boy and was based in part on her brother Harold. John Schlesinger later filmed it with Shirley MacLaine. Mate in Three (1966) treated marital betrayal in thinly veiled form. Then came The Elected Member (1969), published in the United States as Chosen People. The novel examines a respectable London Jewish family whose favourite son, Norman, a former barrister, becomes an amphetamine addict and is committed to a psychiatric hospital. Rubens used ideas associated with the psychiatrist R. D. Laing: that a disturbed person often comes from a disturbing family. The book won the Booker Prize in 1970, the prize’s second year. The shortlist included Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor. Rubens was the first woman to win and remains the only Welsh winner. The novel had sold only a few thousand copies before the announcement; afterwards it became widely known.
She continued at a steady pace, producing short, readable novels that often mixed the domestic and the extreme. I Sent a Letter to My Love (1975), set in Wales, was filmed with Simone Signoret. A Five Year Sentence (1978) was shortlisted for the Booker. Spring Sonata (1979) is narrated in part from the point of view of an unborn child who decides not to be born. Sunday Best, Mr Wakefield’s Crusade (later a BBC series), Our Father and others explored loneliness, transvestism, sudden violence and the quiet desperation of ordinary lives. Brothers (1983) was her most ambitious book: a multi-generational Jewish family saga moving from Tsarist Russia and the Odessa pogrom through emigration, Cardiff, Germany and the Holocaust. Kingdom Come (1990) won the Jewish Quarterly / Wingate Prize. Later novels included I, Dreyfus (1999), a bleak look at antisemitism, Nine Lives and The Sergeant’s Tale (2003). A memoir, When I Grow Up, appeared after her death in 2005.
Critics described her as a chronicler of the frayed edge of middle-class Jewish life and of damaged souls. She herself was modest. She said she did not particularly enjoy writing but liked having written, and that her work was “better than most, not as good as some.” She wrote quickly, often in a single draft, and kept producing almost a book every year or two into her seventies. She served as a Booker judge in 1986 and was an honorary vice-president of International PEN. The University of Wales made her a fellow and awarded her an honorary D.Litt.
She was a lifelong chain smoker. In the late 1990s her health declined. She died on 13 October 2004 in the Royal Free Hospital, London, after a stroke compounded by chronic bronchitis. She was eighty-one by the 1923 birth date, seventy-six by the date she preferred. Two daughters survived her.
Rubens’s reputation has never been as large as the Booker win might suggest. She sat slightly apart from fashionable London literary circles. Her Welshness was accidental in origin and she sometimes treated it with irony, yet she remains the only Welsh Booker winner. Her subject was often the gap between family expectation and individual collapse, treated with humour that never quite cancelled the pain. The books are still in print in various editions. They reward readers who want fiction that is both readable and unsparing about how people wound one another inside the home.