Kitchen, Paddy 1934–2005

(Patricia Margaret Kitchen)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born May 23, 1934, in London, England; died November 23, 2005. Author. Kitchen was a novelist and biographer whose artistic background also led to a reputation as an art critic. Although highly intelligent, she turned down a chance to attend Cambridge University, but agreed to go to secretarial school on her father's urging. After her father fell into hard financial times, this training proved useful; Kitchen found work at an advertising agency and then at Time and Tide magazine. From 1957 to 1960, she was assistant registrar at the Royal College of Art, where she became exposed to the art world and the work of painter Frank Bowling, who would be the first of her two husbands. Her second husband was writer Dulan Barber, whom she married in 1968 after divorcing Bowling. Other art-related appointments included working as assistant to the principal at the Chelsea School of Art and as organizing assistant for the Gulbenkian Exhibition at the Tate Gallery during the early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, Kitchen had become a freelance editor and novelist, publishing her first work of fiction, Lying-in, in 1965. Other novels that followed include A Fleshly School (1970), Paradise (1972), and A Pillar of Cloud (1979). She was also the author of biographies on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Patrick Geddes. A contributor of art criticism to Country Life magazine, Kitchen wrote the guide The Way to Write Novels (1981; revised edition, 1986). Furthermore, she supported artists and writers through her association with the Arts Council literature panel and as founder, with Barber, of the Artists' Licensing and Collecting Society.

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PERIODICALS

Guardian (London, England), December 12, 2005, p. 30.