Lynne Reid Banks, a versatile British author who began her writing career with the best-selling feminist novel “The L-Shaped Room” but found her greatest success in the popular children’s book “The Indian in the Cupboard,” died Thursday in Surrey, England. He is 94.
Her death, in a care facility, was caused by cancer, said James Wills, her literary agent.
Ms. Banks was part of a generation of writers, including Shelagh Delaney and Margaret Drabble, who emerged in post-war Britain and whose books explored the struggles of young women seeking personal and financial independence, in stark contrast to the contemporary “angry young men” literary movement defined by John Osborne and Kingsley Amis.
During her long career, the character descriptions of Ms. Banks has often been called insensitive and offensive for his language, especially in his two most famous works. He was a complex, sometimes contradictory figure who became increasingly unrepentant about his strongly held opinions.
“The L-Shaped Room” (1960), hailed by critics as a second-wave feminist novel, tells the story of an unmarried secretary whose conservative, middle-class father kicks her out of their home when she is pregnant. Instead of contacting the boy’s father, he rented a small, L-shaped room at the top of a London rooming house and became part of an improvised family of fellow boarders, including a jazz musician born in Caribbean. Class, race, sexism and the danger of illegal abortion are all central to the plot.
Ms. did not consider Banks was herself a feminist when she wrote the book; as a young woman coming of age in the 1950s, she said, she thought men were superior.
But he soon changed his mind. “What a joke,” he told the BBC programme “Book club” in 2010. “I mean, I don’t believe that anymore. I think women are eternally the superior sex and men are probably the most dangerous creatures on the planet.
Ms. regretted Banks the racial groups used in her portrayal of the Caribbean maid in “The L-Shaped Room,” acknowledging that racism permeated her narrative. “Prejudices exist, and they come out in this book, and it’s embarrassing, but they’re there,” he told the BBC. “They’re really part of the environment.”
The novel became an immediate best seller in Britain and was made into a film, which was released in the United States in 1963 and starred Leslie Caron, who was nominated for an Oscar for best actress.
After “The Indian in the Cupboard” was published in 1980, The New York Times recognized it as the best novel of the year for children. Ms. wrote Banks four sequels.
The first book in the series begins when a boy, Omri, is given an old medicine cabinet with magical properties: When he places plastic action figures inside, they come to life. The first toy he brings to life is a Native American named Little Bear — the “Indian” of the title. One of Omri’s friends puts his toy cowboy in the cabinet, and a grueling battle begins.
Although the purported message to young readers is the importance of tolerance and respect for other cultures, Ms. Banks of persistent stereotypes. (Little Bear speaks in a dialect of broken English, and the cowboy is a laconic man who likes his whiskey.)
By the fourth book, “The Mystery of the Cupboard” (1993), critics were impatient with the clichéd characters who would appear in the magic cupboard. “Through its innocent-seeming mirror march through a series of seductive, albeit relatable cultural stereotypes, which are ever predictable and true to the dictates of their gender, ethnic group or era,” wrote the fiction writer Michael Dorris in The New York Times Book Review.
The American Indian Library Association in 1991 listed “The Indian in the Cupboard” series was among the “titles to avoid,” and a school board in British Columbia temporarily removed the first book from its libraries in 1992, mention “offensive treatment of indigenous people.”
However, the series remained popular, and “The Indian in the Cupboard” was adapted into a 1995 film directed by Frank Oz.
Lynne Reid Banks was born in London on July 31, 1929. She was the only child of James and Muriel (Reid) Banks. His father, who was from Scotland, was a doctor; his mother, who was Irish and known as Pat, was an actress.
As a child during World War II, Lynne was evacuated with her mother to Canada, where they settled in Saskatchewan. It was a very happy time, and the man’s worth in the war only became clear when he returned to London at the age of 15.
“I found my city in ruins,” he says in an interview for the reference work “Authors and Artists for Young Adults.” When he learns about the hardships during the war that the rest of his family suffered, he is scared and ashamed. “I feel like a deserter,” he said.
He first pursued a career as an actor, studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and working in repertory theatre. He also started writing plays. In 1955, she became one of the first female television reporters in England, working for Independent Television News (later ITV). One day, he was asked to test a new typewriter in the newsroom. One sentence led to another, and he realized that he was writing in the voice of a woman who was pregnant, single and alone. These random first sentences became the seeds of “The L-shaped Room.”
“I didn’t know I had a book,” he later told the BBC. “I know I have a situation.”
The success of the novel gave him the freedom to write full time, and he quit his television job. But her life changed when she met and married Chaim Stephenson, a sculptor, and moved to Israel to join him on a kibbutz.
The move led her mother to accuse her of wasting her talent and putting herself in a dangerous and “soul-destroying” situation, Ms. Banks wrote in The Guardian in 2017. But she loved her adopted country, and she taught English and continued to write while raising three sons, until the family returned to England in 1971.
Ms. wrote Banks’ two sequels to “The L-Shaped Room” — “The Backward Shadow” (1970) and “Two is Lonely” (1974) — as well as two books on the Brontë sisters: “Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontës ” (1976) and “Path to the Silent Country: Charlotte Brontë’s Years of Fame” (1977).
He began writing books for children and young adults in the 1970s, incorporating elements of magic and fantasy that find full expression in “The Indian in the Cupboard.” He wrote more than 45 books for adults and children in total, many with a Jewish theme, as well as 13 plays produced for radio and theater.
The challenges of being a single mother is a theme that Ms. Banks in 2014 in “Uprooted, A Canadian War Kwento,” a young adult novel based on the years he and his mother spent in Canada during the war.
He is survived by three sons, Adiel, Gillon and Omri Stephenson, and three Grandchildren. Her husband died in 2016.
Ms. Banks remained productive in his later years. “It’s good to be old,” he wrote in The Guardian in 2017, in an essay about the benefits of aging. “I can be eccentric, self-indulgent — even offensive.”
Indeed, at the age of 85, he was touched by another literary outrage when he wrote a letter protesting The Guardian’s decision to award its children’s fiction prize to David Almond for his book “A Song for Ella Grey” (2015), who write that a book with “lesbian sex,” as well as swearing and drinking, is not suitable for children.
A predictable shout in response to his letter followed. “Although I’m still outside of modern life,” he wrote, “getting older means I don’t care what people think of my opinions.”
Sofia Poznansky contributed reporting,
