My friend the writer Mariana Villa-Gilbert, who has died aged 86, was the author of several mid-century novels, including A Jingle-Jangle Song, published in 1968, an important British lesbian work.
The hermetically sealed world of her novels reflects not only the influence of Virginia Woolf, but also her own intensely oppressive upbringing. Themes of sexual ambiguity and bisexuality are important in her work. When I interviewed Mariana in 2022 as part of a project on the history of lesbian literature, she said: “I feel I am neither a woman, nor a man. I feel I am only myself.”
After a chaotic early life, in the late 1950s she had attended Saint Martin’s School of Art (now Central Saint Martins), where she studied sculpture with Elisabeth Frink. But she was determined, above all, to be a writer.
In 1963 the agent Herbert van Thal sold her novel Mrs Galbraith’s Air to Chatto & Windus. During her first lunch with the publisher Norah Smallwood, held at the Ivy, Mariana was so frightened that she barely spoke a word. Nevertheless, Smallwood became her champion at the firm, in a relationship that would last for the next decade. Two more novels followed: My Love All Dressed in White (1964), and Mrs Cantello (1966).
In A Jingle-Jangle Song, her fourth book, Mariana wrote about the relationship between a young Joan Baez-like musician and an older woman. Attacked by reviewers for its lesbian content, it nevertheless gained a following in the lesbian press and stands as an important contribution to the genre. Mariana followed this with The Others (1970) and Manuela: A Modern Myth (1973). The story collection The Sun in Horus, featuring some of her most mature writing, appeared after a long hiatus in 1986.
Mariana lived, for her childhood and adolescence, a riches-to-rags story. Born in Croydon, south London, to Walter Villa-Gilbert, an inventor and industrialist who claimed a connection to WS Gilbert, and Ada (nee Hill), a housewife, she spent her early life in Devon, near her father’s factory. When her father died suddenly in 1944, when Mariana was seven, her life altered considerably. Although her father left a sizeable estate, her mother, who exhibited the signs of bipolar disorder, spent lavishly. She remarried, to a Polish RAF officer, Marjan Gorączko.
With funds running low, in 1947 the family relocated to Gorączko’s home town of Myślenice in Poland. Refused entry into the local school because they were English, and neglected by their mother and stepfather, Mariana and her sister, Gerda, spent their days wandering the local countryside, scrounging what food they could.
An appeal to the British embassy led to their removal to England on humanitarian grounds in 1952, and, despite the chaos of the previous years, Mariana successfully completed school, boarding at St Finian’s, Cold Ash, in Berkshire, before going to Saint Martin’s.
After her mother’s death in 1993, she and her sister moved to Cornwall, where she wrote poetry. Fiercely independent, she was also deeply attuned to nature.
Mariana is survived by a large extended family (many of whom she met only later in life), including her cousin Grahame and her nieces Catherine, Jacquie and Tracy.
