Quick Facts
Biography
Eva Figes (/ˈfaɪdʒiːz/; 15 April 1932 – 28 August 2012) was an English author. Figes wrote novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany.
Life
Born Eva Unger, she arrived in Britain in 1939 with her parents and a younger brother.
After graduating B.A. with honours from Queen Mary College in London in 1953, she worked in publishing until 1967, when she became a full-time writer.
She was married in 1954 to John George Figes. They had two children: the writer Catherine J. ("Kate") Figes, and the academic Orlando G. Figes.
The marriage was dissolved by divorce in 1962.
In the 1960s she was associated with an informal group of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall that included Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin, Alan Burns, and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.
Figes' 1983 novel, Light, is an impressionistic portrait of a single day in the life of Claude Monet from sunrise to sunset. Her best known work is probably Patriarchal Attitudes, a feminist polemic written in 1970, and she won the Guardian Fiction Prize for Winter Journey in 1967.
Selected bibliography
Fiction
- Equinox (1966)
- Winter Journey (1967)
- Konek Landing (1969)
- B (1972)
- Days (1974)
- Nelly's Version (1977)
- Waking (1981)
- Light (1983)
- The Seven Ages: A Novel (1986)
- Ghosts (1988)
- The Tree of Knowledge (1990)
- The Tenancy (1993)
- The Knot (1996)
Literary and social criticism
- Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (1970)
- Tragedy and Social Evolution (1976)
- Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850 (1982)
- Women's Letters in Wartime, 1450-1945 (1993)
Memoirs
- Little Eden: A Child at War (1978)
- Tales of Innocence and Experience: An Exploration (2004)
- Journey to Nowhere (2008)