Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

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Standard Name: Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer
Birth Name: Ruth Prawer
Married Name: Ruth Jhabvala
Self-constructed Name: R. Prawer Jhabvala
RPJ has been successful in two careers: as a novelist (a dozen titles) and short-story writer (eight collections), and as an author of film scripts (twenty-three), many of them adaptations from published fiction.
Watts, Janet. “Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Obituary”. The Guardian.
The two careers are, however, related. Her written fiction has moved from satirical social comedy about Indian middle-class society, to the impact of the myth of India on susceptible Westerners, to the social and personal whirlpools created when cultures meet, to the flourishing in rootless cultures of predatory, power-seeking individuals and movements. Her film scripts have followed a similar trajectory, while situating her chosen themes in a greater variety of settings and stories than her literary works.
Colour photo of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala at the home of her frequent collaborator, director James Ivory, in Claverack, New York, September 1981. She is wearring a tweed blazer and has her hands in her pockets. She is standing in a park in fall, and the sky is blue with many clouds. The are birch trees in the background are bare.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Anita Desai
She is a lifelong friend of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala , whom she met when she was eighteen and trying to write, and Jhabvala, married with two children, had begun her publishing career.
Jaggi, Maya. “A passage from India”. Guardian.co.uk.
Intertextuality and Influence Anne Bradstreet
Bathsua Makin offered AB as an example of an excellent poet in her Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen, 1673, thereby bringing her to the attention of a large female readership in...
Literary responses Rumer Godden
Nevertheless, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala implicitly criticises the limitations of their viewpoint in choosing to adapt their title for her Two More Under the Indian Sun (in How I Became a Holy Mother, and Other Stories...
Textual Production Anita Desai
AD began writing short stories and poems when she was seven, and some appeared in children's magazines. While an undergraduate she published short stories, reviews, and sketches in Delhi University 's magazine and other periodicals....
Textual Production Jean Rhys
It was directed by James Ivory , who co-wrote the screenplay with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala .The producers were Ismail Merchant and Jean Pierre Mahot , and it was distributed by New World Pictures . It...
Textual Production Bernice Rubens
Writing a second novel, she said, was inevitable after the first, and after that she was hooked.
Rubens, Bernice. When I Grow Up. Time Warner Books, 2005.
139
She drew for it on her brother Harold's stories of his music teacher in London.
Rubens, Bernice. When I Grow Up. Time Warner Books, 2005.
10
The...

Timeline

21 February 1924
The first issue appeared of the New Yorkermagazine (still going strong in the twenty-first century).
Borne Back Daily.
21 February 2011