But Marilynne Robinson had other things to occupy her. It looked like an exciting new career had been launched. The novel went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. ‘You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.’ Housekeeping was published in 1980 and an early review by Anatole Broyard in the New York Times turned out to be only the first to laud this masterpiece: She did find one in Farrar Straus and Giroux (and Faber in the UK), who said they loved it but that it would be hard to sell. The agent loved it but took it on with the caveat that she thought it would be hard to find a publisher.

Motherhood influenced that first novel: ‘It changes your sense of life, your sense of yourself.’ She showed her manuscript to a friend who, unbeknownst to her, sent it to Ellen Levine, a New York literary agent. She married and had two sons, though later divorced, and wrote Housekeeping in the evenings after the children went to bed. She graduated from Brown University, where she studied American Literature, and while she was at the University of Washington, studying for a PhD in English (on Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2), her first novel about two little lost sisters began to take shape.

She was brought up Presbyterian but became a Congregationalist, strongly influenced by John Calvin. David Summers became a Renaissance art scholar and painter, and Marilynne dedicated her collection of essays When I Was a Child I Read Books to him, ‘the first and best of my teachers’.

When Marilynne was young, her brother declared that he would be an artist and she would be a poet.

Her father worked in the timber industry and her mother kept home for the family. Marilynne Robinson has spoken of her enduring relationship with them: ‘I have found that when you write a novel, a character never actually leaves you from that point on.’īorn Marilynne Summers in 1943 in Sandpoint, Idaho, the town she used for the backdrop of her first novel, Housekeeping, she is the youngest of two. In many ways an uncategorisable writer, she will be forever cherished as the creator of some of the most memorable fictional characters, including Jack Boughton, John Ames and Lila Ames from her Gilead quartet, and Lucille and Ruth from Housekeeping. Regarded as one of America’s most important, graceful and original writers, Marilynne Robinson is loved for her deep humanity and prized for her generous intellectual rigour. ‘I have found that when you write a novel, a character never actually leaves you from that point on.’

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