Eivor Martinus 1943-2023

This too she had commemorated in literary form, in an account entitled I går sjöng näktergalen (Yesterday the Nightingale Sang, Carlsson Bokförlag, 2016), to which she appended the subtitle En sann berättelse om kärlek och alzheimer (A True Story about Love and Alzheimer’s), much of which gives snatches of their joint biography in the form of reminiscences told to Derek at his bedside in an attempt to stimulate his fading mind and memory. Having married in 1963, the year after she began her studies of English and Swedish literature at Gothenburg University (she completed her interrupted Gothenburg degree from the UK in the mid-seventies), they went to Northern Rhodesia in 1964, the very year it gained its independence as Zambia, where Derek was judging a theatre competition and then directing a play. Back in Britain, briefly in the New Forest, but soon realising their professional and cultural life had to be based in London, Chiswick became their home for most of their working lives. After Derek's retirement and with both their daughters living elsewhere, they downsized to an apartment overlooking the Thames in Fulham, between the famous football ground and the historic former bishops’ palace. Eivor in widowhood often visited the café in the latter, a venue which always seemed to me to have an ambience more Swedish than English.

She translated two major novels, the publication of the first of which was the result of her own initiative in pitching the project to Peter Owen, a tactical success achieved by very few translators, who usually have to depend on being the passive recipients of publishers' commissions even when they are themselves part of the process as publishers' readers. That was Bengt Söderbergh's The Mysterious Barricades (Peter Owen, 1986), the poetic musicality of which she rendered into exquisitely appropriate English. She then undertook Reidar Jönsson's My Life as a Dog for Faber (1989), a novel with theatrical potential realised by other hands in film and stage form.

Her desire to write, both objectively and more personally, was lifelong. Even in her schooldays she wrote (unpublished) poetry. In motherhood, she followed the example of many a children's author in publishing a series of four books in Swedish which presumably emanated from stories composed with her own children in mind. All the titles began Pia och Lotta..., her real daughters' names, recounting various imaginary adventures.

For me her magnum opus remains her critical biography of Strindberg, Strindberg and Love, published by the Amber Lane Press in Oxford in 2001, a publisher with whom she had built up a close relationship through some of her drama translations. In this thoroughly well-researched work she argues convincingly against the prevailing view, particularly in the UK, of Strindberg as a misogynist, which she attributed in part to the narrowness of the repertoire here and partly to a lack of recognition of the humorous element in his drama. She pointed out that none of his wives or mistresses ever complained of his attitude towards them. The bad press he often received may have also been in some measure due to his own often inadequate transposition of autobiography into literary form in his writings. This book might have become better known had it been issued by a major publisher. It was well enough respected for it to have been subsequently published in Swedish in Eivor's own translation of her original English edition, under the title Lite djävel, lite ängel: Strindberg och hans kvinnor (Carlsson Bokförlag, 2007).

Writing seemed to occupy more of her time as her age increased and health declined. It was not only the autobiographical to which she turned her attention, but also historical biography. Her penetrating and gently feminist account of the little-known life and achievements of the woman we know as Philippa of England, who became Queen of Denmark, Norway and Sweden when she married Eric of Pomerania, King of the Kalmar Union, in 1406, was published in Sweden in 2014, under the title Barndrottningen Filippa och hennes värld (Philippa the Child-Queen and her World) (Carlsson Bokförlag). She followed it with a study of Saint Birgitta and her daughter Katarina, I skuggan av ett helgon (In the Shadow of a Saint) (Carlsson Bokförlag, 2021), a fusion of historical research and personal introspection: enlightening, thought-provoking, but to this atheistic reader a rather unsatisfactory exploration of the religious experience. It is interpretative and analytical of historical facts and characters, but interspersed with musings on the nature of ‘holiness’, even questioning present clergy on their understanding of the concept. Eivor’s own position seems to me that of an agnostic (‘om det nu finns en Gud överhuvudtaget’ – ‘If God does indeed exist’ – she writes at one point). She rounds off the book with an experience of her own in the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Nice. To me it would have been a cultural experience with negative overtones, but to Eivor it was clearly a quasi-religious one whether she fully believed or not.
 

Despite her illness, and well into normal retirement age, Eivor continued her part-time teaching at the South Bank International School in central London's Fitzrovia, an insecure post she held for thirty years. Her enthusiasm about the potential of gifted pupils preparing for the International Baccalaureate in Swedish literature suggested to me that she must have been an inspiring teacher. She participated in the cultural and spiritual life of the Swedish Church in London, even holding a large gathering of many of her friends and colleagues there for her seventieth birthday, which her husband was too unwell to attend or even comprehend; and she belonged to the Anglo-Swedish Society and SveaBritt, a network organisation for professional Swedish women in the UK, of which she was a founder member on its inception in 1981 and which she actively served in office and as a speaker. Coincidentally this was the same year she joined SELTA, in the first year of its existence.

She continued to manifest the sociability and energy which had so characterised her life with Derek among their circles of theatrical and literary friends. Her penultimate decade was devoted to selfless care for Derek, both at home and finally in his nursing home, yet somehow finding time for her research and writing. In the last decade she still had the energy and initiative to undertake promotional tours for her books in Sweden. She also continued her regular summer sojourns at the idyllic cottage on the Blekinge shore where she and Derek had enjoyed so many years of sailing and cycling since 1974, latterly fitting in Swedish medical treatment to supplement that which she was receiving in Britain.

Eivor remained not only stoical in the face of her husband's devastating diagnosis, but also courageous and defiant in respect of her own subsequent prognosis. She displayed such a positive attitude that it almost certainly prolonged her life and enabled her to complete more projects. Her indefatigability was perhaps born in part from the predominantly freelance life she and her husband Derek had led. She is survived by her two daughters and three grandchildren who had become a real focus of pride and interest for her.