Susan Chitty, who has died aged 92, was a writer specialising in biography and autobiography. She was the daughter of the “Catholic novelist” Antonia White, best known for Frost in May, but her chosen genres could hardly have been further removed from White’s intense and frequently anguished novels and religious writing.
Throughout her career, Chitty alternated books drawn from her own life with those drawing on the lives of literary others. She was first published in 1952, when she won a Vogue talent contest and was taken on as a staff journalist. Her experiences at the magazine formed the basis of her first book, the mordantly witty The Diary of a Fashion Model (1958), a story of English debs breaking into the fashion industry.
White Huntress (1963) told of the dashing adventures of English debs in Africa, and followed a spell when Chitty and her husband were living in Nairobi. My Life and Horses (1966) was the first of several expressing a love of horses so fierce that, as a young child, she claimed to believe she was herself a horse. The publicity material noted it was “aimed at adults, but might provide a useful corrective for a teenager convinced she wants to work with horses”. A warning, it emerged, less against horses than stable managers who pursue and assail young riders behind the feed bins.
When Chitty’s fictitious adventures paused, she turned to biographies, mainly of Victorian subjects, that were characterised by the vigorous descriptions of their period. They included The Woman Who Wrote Black Beauty: A Life of Anna Sewell (1972); The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (1975); Charles Kingsley’s Landscape (1976); Gwen John, (1981) and That Singular Person called Lear (1986).
Later, Chitty became increasingly devoted to an exegesis of White’s work and her role as a mother. White died in 1980, and in 1985 Chitty published Now to My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White. Clearly a labour of pain as well as love, it inevitably explored Chitty’s unusual background. White was married to Eric Earnshaw Smith at the time of Susan’s birth, but Susan’s father was Rudolph (“Silas”) Glossop, a geological engineer with whom White was having an affair. Awaiting the annulment of White’s marriage, Glossop went to Canada to earn enough to support a new family. On his return, she informed him that she had decided instead to marry Tom Hopkinson, a journalist several years her junior (and, by his second marriage, my father).
Eight months later, another daughter was born to White, named Lyndall after a principal character in Olive Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm. The baby Susan had been placed in a children’s home. Once White and Hopkinson had married, she was brought to live with them and given his surname.
This was the complicated start of an enduringly difficult mother-daughter relationship. It was only when Susan was seven that she was told that the kindly Mr Glossop who brought her presents from abroad was in fact her father. He also continued to provide for Susan’s upkeep, including school fees to board at Godolphin school, Salisbury, from where she obtained an exhibition to Somerville College, Oxford, to study history. Sadly, Susan had inherited her mother’s depressive illness, which today would probably be diagnosed as bipolar disorder. At Oxford, she had a mental breakdown in her final year, and missed taking her graduation exams.
By then, however, she had met Thomas Chitty, a fellow aspiring writer (who later succeeded his father as 3rd baronet). In 1951 they married in a register office, in the presence of Glossop and his wife. White was not informed, and it took until 1957 before mother and daughter were reconciled and White could meet her first two grandchildren, Andrew and Cordelia.
In 1953, following the critical success of Thomas’s first novel, Mr Nicholas (written under the pen name Thomas Hinde) the Chittys moved to the small Sussex village of West Hoathly where they rented (and later bought) Bow Cottage. There they dedicated themselves to their writing and their children, two more of whom (Miranda and Jessica) arrived in 1967 and 1971. Their births were bridged by a period when Thomas taught at Boston University and the family lived in the US; his previous stint as a PR with Shell had taken them to Kenya.
Further, more exciting, travel ensued when the family set out on what became the topic of The Great Donkey Walk (1977), co-written by the parents. Initially intended – at least by Thomas, who had served in the navy during the second world war – to be a sailing voyage around the world, it became modified by Chitty to “a walk from Santiago de Compostela to Smyrna”. In the event, after both the youngest daughters fell off their donkey, each breaking an arm, the journey finally terminated at Thessaloniki in Greece. Yet it provided curious and, as ever, amusing, book material.
The experience persuaded Chitty to acquire the large field behind Bow Cottage, where she kept five horses. In 1979, she published The Young Rider, a second horse manual (four years after The Puffin Book of Horses, which she co-wrote with Anne Parry).
Her writing in the 1980s and 90s increasingly followed Chitty’s preoccupation with her mother. Now to My Mother received high praise in Hilary Spurling’s review for the Observer: “Mrs Chitty’s painful, absorbing book describes the brushes with madness recorded from the other side, so to speak, in her mother’s later fiction.” Yet it led to an unfortunate falling out with Lyndall, who was prompted to write her own memoir, Nothing to Forgive (1988), in a very different tone.
There followed a version of White’s diaries, edited by Susan, which proved at least as contentious as the memoir. Both sisters were White’s literary executors and it was the opinion of their co-executor, Carmen Callil of Virago (which had published both White and Lyndall), that an external editor should be hired to work on the diaries. Susan took the matter to court and won, being appointed sole editor on the legal grounds that she was the sole financial beneficiary of her mother’s will. The rift was, however, healed well before the two sisters reached serious old age.
In 1997, Susan’s final biography, Playing the Game, of another Victorian subject, the poet Sir Henry Newbolt, was published. Thereafter she continued enjoying the company of her family, friends and horses. Traditional celebrations and parties, dressing up, horse-riding and folk-singing remained de rigueur.
Thomas died in 2014. Susan is survived by their children and eight grandchildren; and by Lyndall.
• Susan Elspeth Chitty, writer, born 18 August 1929; died 13 July 2021
