Fielding

GABRIEL FIELDING (1916 - 1986)

This was the pseudonym of Alan Gabriel Barnsley, novelist and poet, who was born in Hexham. His father was a clergyman and his mother Katherine Mary Fielding-Smith claimed descent from the novelist Henry Fielding. She was a playwright and also bred whippets. Fielding described his childhood as 'golden' until he was shipped off to public school in Eastbourne. He had a hard time there and looked back on his experience as 'the beginning of the pain out of which I write.'

In 1946 Fielding became a doctor and practised in Maidstone, Kent for the next twenty years. He and his wife entered the Roman Catholic church in 1954. He was a close friend of Muriel Spark, another convert, and Spark dedicated her first novel The Comforters to the Barnsleys. Graham Greene also encouraged his writing. He published a volume of poems in 1952 - The Frog Prince. His first novel Brotherly Love (1954) introduced the troubled John Blaydon who figured in five novels all told. The Birthday King (1962) is about a family of part-Jewish Catholic industrialists in Nazi Germany and won the W.H. Smith prize for literature. Other novels followed until his last book, The Women of Guinea Lane in which John Blaydon, now a surgeon, observes the women round him.

J.K.L. Walker writes of:' ... his sense that life, especially for women, is hard, that happiness is precarious and daily vulnerable to some unexplained assault on body or mind.'

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
GABRIEL FIELDING (1916 - 1986) This was the pseudonym of Alan Gabriel Barnsley, novelist and poet, who was born in Hexham. His father was a clergyman and his mother Katherine Mary Fielding-Smith claimed descent from the novelist Henry Fielding. She was a playwright and also bred whippets. Fielding described his childhood as 'golden' until he was shipped off to public school in Eastbourne. He had a hard time there and looked back on his experience as 'the beginning of the pain out of which I write.' In 1946 Fielding became a doctor and practised in Maidstone, Kent for the next twenty years. He and his wife entered the Roman Catholic church in 1954. He was a close friend of Muriel Spark, another convert, and Spark dedicated her first novel The Comforters to the Barnsleys. Graham Greene also encouraged his writing. He published a volume of poems in 1952 - The Frog Prince. His first novel Brotherly Love (1954) introduced the troubled John Blaydon who figured in five novels all told. The Birthday King (1962) is about a family of part-Jewish Catholic industrialists in Nazi Germany and won the W.H. Smith prize for literature. Other novels followed until his last book, The Women of Guinea Lane in which John Blaydon, now a surgeon, observes the women round him. J.K.L. Walker writes of:' ... his sense that life, especially for women, is hard, that happiness is precarious and daily vulnerable to some unexplained assault on body or mind.'
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