Following graduation from grammar school, Bawden was awarded a scholarship to Somerville College in Oxford where she studied politics, philosophy and economics. She graduated in 1946, took an M.A. in 1951, and in 1960, following the publication of several novels, attended the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.
Upon her graduation Nina Mabey married H. W. Bawden. She has two sons from this marriage, which ended in divorce. She married her present husband, Austen Kark, now Controller of the BBC's World Service, in 1954. They have a daughter.
Bawden tells us she was writing at an early age. "I wrote plays for my toy theatre and an epic poem in blank verse." This writing seems to have functioned in several ways for her: as a stay against the confusions of experience, and as almost palpable protection. In a recent interview she said, "Writing helps to explain things." And in her latest novel, Walking Naked, the main character (a novelist herself) expands this notion: writers, she says, "are compulsive rearrangers, obsessional shapers of patterns," but she insists that this is only "to make the truth clearer." In the same novel the protagonist also speaks of the comforts of writing: "I can always make myself brave with words, drawing them on like a comforting garment against the cold weather." She admits that her own "love of pattern" has sometimes led to flaws in her novels, though it has also been a source of great strength.
This is a free page. This page contains 155 words. This
biography contains 4,298 words (approx. 14 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Nina (Mary Mabey) Bawden Access Pass.
