Madeleine St John Books in Order

Madeleine St John was born on 12 November 1941 in Castlecrag, a Sydney suburb, and grew up in a family shaped by books, politics and difficult silences. Her father, Edward St John, was a barrister and politician. Her mother, Sylvette, died when Madeleine was twelve, a loss that changed the course of her childhood.

She attended Queenwood School and later studied arts at the University of Sydney. It was a lively time to be there. Her fellow students included people who would go on to public lives in writing, film, art and theatre, among them Germaine Greer, Clive James and Bruce Beresford.

After university, St John married filmmaker Christopher Tillam. The couple spent time in the United States, but the marriage ended, and in 1968 she moved to London. She would live in the city for most of the rest of her life, especially around Notting Hill.

London gave her material, though not in any tidy or glamorous way.

She worked in offices, bookshops and an antiques shop while trying to find a path into writing. For eight years, she worked on a biography of Helena Blavatsky, then destroyed the manuscript because she wasn't happy with it. That long false start mattered. When she turned to fiction in her early fifties, she had a sharp sense of how people speak, dodge questions, wound each other and keep going.

Her first novel, The Women in Black, arrived in 1993, when she was fifty-two. Set in a Sydney department store during the Christmas rush of 1959, it follows school-leaver Lisa as she joins the women working the shop floor. The novel has room for romance, family pressure, migrant life and the small freedoms that come from being taken seriously. It is St John's only novel set in Australia, and it later became the basis for the stage musical and screen adaptation Ladies in Black.

Then came the London books. A Pure Clear Light looks closely at the marriage of Flora and Simon Beaufort after Simon begins an affair and Flora returns to religious faith. The Essence of the Thing begins with Nicola's abrupt breakup with Jonathan and follows the strange, painful business of trying to understand a person who suddenly seems unfamiliar. In 1997, that novel made St John the first Australian woman shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Her final completed novel, A Stairway to Paradise, brings together Alex, Andrew and Barbara in a tangle of attraction, loneliness and bad timing. Across these books, St John returned to love, marriage, friendship, faith, class and the gap between what people say and what they mean. Her characters can be selfish, anxious, funny and deeply unsure of themselves. The comedy is dry, but the feelings underneath are real.

She published only four novels.

St John kept much of her private life private, and her fiction became the place where her close observation did its work. Her London settings are full of flats, parties, shops, strained meals and conversations that seem ordinary until one line changes the mood of a whole room.

She died in London on 18 June 2006, aged sixty-four, after emphysema. An unfinished novel remained among her papers. The four books she completed are compact, humane stories about people trying, often awkwardly, to make a life that feels honest.