Lambert, Angela 1940–2007

(Angela Maria Lambert)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 14, 1940, in Beckenham, Kent, England; died September 26, 2007. Novelist, historian, journalist, and author. Lambert once told CA: "It is difficult for anyone who is not British to comprehend the degree to which snobbery, accent, and the class system dominate this society," and that is what she wrote about, in both her novels and her nonfiction writing. Through more than thirty years of working as a television and newspaper journalist, she found her greatest pleasure in writing books. Lambert published at least ten books in her lifetime, at least half of them novels dealing with social class and what she described to CA as "the changing role of women" in society. Love among the Single Classes(1989) is the story of a woman, abandoned by her husband, who searches for passion in the classified ads, only to find that love continues to elude her. The Constant Mistress(1998) relates the musings of a dying woman who chose a life of work and passion over the comforts of love and family. Lambert's fiction was generally well received, but no more so than her works of social history. Unquiet Souls: The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy, 1880-1918(1984), which was nominated for the prestigious Whitbread Award, documents the activities of a small, elite group of British aristocrats ("The Souls") that gradually dwindled into oblivion at the end of World War I. The book 1939: The Last Season of Peace describes the last fling, as it were, of London high society as it launched its newest debutantes into a world poised on the brink of war. Lambert's final book,The Lost Life of Eva Braun, her 2006 biography of the mistress of Adolf Hitler, was at the time of its publication almost alone in its field. Lambert's life as an author (and a single parent) was financed by a series of "day jobs" that earned her as much respect among her peers as her literary efforts did among her critics. She worked as a television reporter and presenter for Independent Television News, London Weekend Television, and Thames Television between 1972 and 1988. She moved into print journalism in 1990 as a feature writer and interviewer for the Independent, the Daily Mail, and, until 2003, the Sunday Telegraph.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Times(London, England), September 27, 2007, p. 62.