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ElizabethNerina Shute
(July 17, 1908 - October 20, 2004) U.K.

Nerina Shute

Writer, journalist

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Nerina Shute was born in Prudhoe, Northumberland. Her father was Cameron Shute. Her mother, née Amy Bertha ("Renie") Pepper Stavely, was of a well-to-do family.

After a childhood overshadowed by her parents' fast living in London and then Hollywood, in the course of which she sold her first story to McClure's Magazine at 16, she returned to England. There, living in Devon, she soon became as discontented as she had been in America. She arrived in London in 1928.

She contemplated marriage to a man called Charles, a doctor who had been struck off for performing an abortion, but thought better of it and promptly missed him while the capital buzzed. Of London's lesbians she noted: "They lied, cheated and had hysterics . . . the code of homosexuality might be all right in theory but the people who practised it were intolerable."

All this would form a part of the novel, Another Man's Poison , which she had written in the evenings and at weekends. Palpably autobiographical, it tells of young Melis Gordon whose wild mother leaves a naval husband for Hollywood lovers. With descriptions of American schoolgirl life, its heroine even writes a prizewinning story before being recalled to an England of dull Devon and wild, flirtatious London. It appeared in 1931.

Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Daily Express , summoned her to meet him at his home. After a brief interview, he gave her a five-pound note, a job at the Express and invited her to ride horses with him the next week. But that was the only time they met, and she shortly lost the job at the Express.

She moved to Liverpool for six months to live with Charles, but six months was all that she could take. She dropped him and returned to London.

She got a job with the Sunday Referee , which made her film critic. Suddenly, she was in a world of morning shows, lunches of cocktails and caviar at the Savoy. A boon companion for more than two years was John Betjeman, who was at that time the film critic for the Standard .

She had a mystery female lover, Josephine, and several flirtations with men during the 1930s. Then she met a journalist, James Wentworth Day. Despite his being on the ugly side and of a clubbish, anti-Modernist hue, she married him in 1936. After two years of bored housewifery, she left him and when it was formed in mid-1939, began training in the WAAF. She soon resigned and learnt to drive an ambulance.

Visiting her mother in Rottingdean, Sussex, she met two women: "Andy" Sharpe and, somewhat older, Helen Mayo, respectively a gynaecologist and one of the first female dental surgeons. Nerina enjoyed an affair with Helen and moved into the pair's house in August 1939. After war broke out, she joined a North London ambulance team.

A year after the outbreak of war she met the broadcaster Howard Marshall. As famous in his day as his friend Richard Dimbleby, he had sent his family abroad, and he and Shute conducted a passionate affair. When his wife returned the lovers agreed to separate for three months, but managed only two, then married.

Their union, which had been joyful as wartime subterfuge, proved fraught in the candour of peace. She found refuge in writing, with a novel about Fanny Burney, Georgian Lady (1958), followed by Poet Pursued (about Shelley, 1951) and Victorian Love Story (on Rossetti, 1954).

Shute's marriage was not helped by losing a baby and the marriage ended after she confessed to him, during a row on New Year's Eve, 1953, that she was having an affair with their French maid. In 1989, Shute was introduced by a friend to the artist Jocelyn Williams who became her lover and, as Shute's long life neared its end, her devoted carer.

With the publication of Passionate Friendships in 1992, she was finally able to be open about her own bisexuality. "For many years I have managed to keep my secrets to myself," she wrote, "protecting the men and women I have loved. Now all my loved ones are dead and no longer vulnerable. No one is left who might be hurt or damaged by these confessions unless it is myself."

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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