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M. M. Kaye

Mary Margaret "Mollie" Kaye(21 August 1908 – 29 January 2004) was a British writer. Her most famous book isThe Far Pavilions(1978).

M. M. Kaye
BornMary Margaret Kaye
(1908-08-21)21 August 1908
Simla,British India
Died29 January 2004(2004-01-29)(aged 95)
Lavenham,Suffolk,England
OccupationAuthor
NationalityBritish
Period1937–1999
GenreHistorical fiction
Notable worksThe Far Pavilions
Spouse
Godfrey John Hamilton
​
​
(m.1945; died 1985)​
RelativesCecil Kaye(father)
James Bachman(grandson)

Life

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M. M. Kaye was born inSimla,British India,and lived in an Oakland, Shimla, a heritage property from 1915 to 1918. She was the elder daughter and one of three children born to SirCecil Kayeand his wife, Margaret Sarah Bryson. Cecil Kaye was an intelligence officer in the Indian Army. M. M. Kaye's grandfather, brother and husband all served theBritish Raj.Her grandfather's cousin, SirJohn William Kaye,wrote the standard accounts of theIndian Mutiny of 1857and theFirst Afghan War.At 10, Mollie Kaye, as she was then known, was sent to England to attend boarding school. She subsequently studied children's book illustration and earned money by designing Christmas cards. In 1926, she briefly returned to live with her family in India, but after her father's death, she was displeased by her mother's pressure to find a junior officer to marry and so returned to England living in London on a small pension based on her late father's army career, augmented first by earnings from illustrating children's books and from 1937 from the publication of children's books written by Kaye. Her first adult novel,Six Bars at Seven,published in 1940, was a thriller that Kaye had been moved to write by regularly reading that type of books from the Fourpenny Library: "Most of the stuff I was reading was total rubbish, and I used to think I couldn't write worse. So I sat down and wrote one."[1][2]

The £64 that she received forSix Bars at Sevenenabled Kaye to return to Simla, where she lived with her married sister, Dorothy Elizabeth Pardey. In June 1941, Kaye met her future husband. TheBritish Indian Armyofficer, Godfrey John Hamilton was four years her junior and reportedly proposed to Kaye on five days' acquaintance.[3]Kaye was pregnant with the couple's second child when she and Hamilton were able to marry onArmistice Day1945, Hamilton's first marriage having been dissolved. After her second child's 1946 birth Kaye returned to writing. (Hamilton's first wife, Mary Penelope Colthurst, lived in Ireland with the couple's daughter. Kaye would later state of her affair with Hamilton, "We just couldn't wait. Had it been peacetime, I wouldn't have done it because of the way I had been brought up. But these were the pressures of war".)[3]After the 1947 dissolution of the British Indian Army because India's achieved independence, Hamilton had transferred to the British Army, where his career necessitated him and his family to relocate 27 times over the next 29 years, with Kaye using several of those locales in a series of crime novels.[1]That inaugurated the rise of the pen name M. M. Kaye, the writer's previous published works having been credited to Mollie Kaye. Kaye's literary agent wasPaul Scott,who had been an army officer in India and would find fame as author ofThe Raj Quartet.It was with Scott's encouragement that Kaye wrote her first historical epic of IndiaShadow of the Moonpublished in 1957. The focal background ofShadow of the Moonis theSepoy Mutinywith which Kaye had been familiarised but stories heard as a child from her family's native servants. That early interest being reinforced in the mid-1950s, when Kaye, on a visit to friends, in India chanced on some transcripts of trials attendant on the Sepoy Mutiny in a shed on her friends' property.[4]Kaye would later state her displeasure over the original published version ofShadow of the Moonbeing edited without her knowledge, with sections focused on action, rather than romance, being largely deleted.[2]

Kaye's second historical novel,Trade Wind,was published in 1963. Kaye, inspired by a visit to India, then planned to commence work on an epic novel with theSecond Anglo-Afghan Waras its background, but she was diagnosed withlung cancer.The prognosis was later changed tolymphosarcoma;enervated bychemotherapy,she was unable to write until she was back in good health, with a resultant delay in the start of her writing the masterpieceThe Far Pavilions,until 1967, when Kaye and the newly-retired Hamilton became longtime residents of the Sussex hamlet ofBoreham Street.[3]

Published in 1978,The Far Pavilionsbecame a worldwide bestseller on publication and caused the successful republishing ofShadow of the Moon,with the previously-deleted sections restored,Trade Windand Kaye's crime novels. Kaye also wrote and illustratedThe Ordinary Princess,a children's book that was called "refreshingly unsentimental" by an article inHorn Book Magazine.[5]She originally it wrote as a short story,[6]and wrote a half-a-dozen detective novels, includingDeath in KashmirandDeath in Zanzibar.Her autobiography has been published in three volumes and was collectively entitledShare of Summer: The Sun in the Morning, Golden Afternoon,andEnchanted Evening.

In March 2003, Kaye was awarded the ColonelJames TodInternational Award by the Maharana Mewar Foundation ofUdaipur, Rajasthan,for her "contribution of permanent value reflecting the spirit and values ofMewar."

Widowed in 1985, Kaye lived with her sister in a wing of Kaye's older daughter's house inHampshirefrom 1987. Kaye relocated to Suffolk in 2001 and was residing inLavenhamwhen she died on 29 January 2004, aged 95. At sunset on 4 March 2006, Kaye's ashes were scattered over the waters from a boat in the middle ofLake Pichola.The duty was performed by Michael Ward, the producer of the West End musical version ofThe Far Pavilions,and his wife, Elaine.[7]A grandson is the comedianJames Bachman.[8]

Work

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References

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  1. ^abHorwell, Veronica,Obituary: MM Kaye,The Guardian,4 February 2004.
  2. ^ab"M M Kaye",The Telegraph,31 January 2004.
  3. ^abcM. M. Kaye Draws on 70 Lively Years to Create An Epic Book on Her Beloved India: People.com
  4. ^"M. M. Kaye: capturing the intrigue of India".Spartanburg Herald-Journal.30 #5 (12 April 1980).
  5. ^Schmitz, Terri (July–August 2002). "Recommended Reissues: Safety in Numbers".Horn Book Magazine.LXXVIII(4). Boston: 432.ISSN0018-5078.
  6. ^"'Far Pavilions' author M.M. Kaye dies ".USA Today.4 February 2004.Retrieved18 November2008.
  7. ^Roy, Amit,"MM Kaye ashes lie in lake",The TelegraphCalcutta, 6 March 2006.
  8. ^Burke's Irish Family Records, 1976, ed. Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, Burke's Peerage Ltd, p. 553

Further reading

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  • Kalpaklı, Fatma. British Novelists and Indian Nationalism [in Mary Margaret Kaye’s Shadow of the Moon (1957), James Gordon Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000)]”. Bethesda: Academica Press, 2010.ISBN978-193-314-677-5.
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