Paddy Kitchen

Patricia Margaret Kitchen (23 May 1934 – 23 November 2005) was an English novelist, biographer and art critic.^[1]

Born in Battersea to middle-class parents, she grew up in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. After rejecting an offer from Cambridge University she moved to London in 1954, working in a Mayfair advertising agency while moonlighting as a hat-check girl in the night club Le Club Contemporain. While working at the Royal College of Art she met the painter Frank Bowling when he was still a student there. They married in 1960 and had one son.^[1] Kitchen was one of the women interviewed by Nell Dunn in Talking to Women (1965).^[2]

After divorcing Bowling in the late 1960s, Kitchen went on to live with, and later marry, the writer Dulan Barber. Continuing to write novels, she also began writing non-fiction with biographies of Patrick Geddes and Gerard Manley Hopkins. In later life she bought a house in Barnwell, Northamptonshire, which became the subject of her book of the same name. She died on 23 November 2005.^[1][3]

The novelist Bessie Head was a close friend. The pair corresponded from 1969 until Head's death in 1986^[4][5] on a range of subjects, including Head's novel A Question of Power.^[6]

Works

Novels

• Lying-In, 1965
• A Fleshly School
• Linsey-Woolsey: A novel, 1971
• Paradise
• (with Dulan Barber) Marriage Ring: A novel, 1977
• A Pillar of Cloud, 1979
• The Golden Veil, 1981
• Blue Shoe, 1988

Non-fiction

• A Most Unsettling Person: An Introduction to the Ideas and Life of Patrick Geddes, 1975
• Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, 1978
• Poets' London, 1980
• Barnwell, 1985
• The Way to Write Novels, 1995