Joan Brady, ballet dancer turned novelist who won the Whitbread for Theory of War – obituary

Joan Brady, who has died aged 84, cut short a promising career as a dancer with the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine; married her mother’s lover, on whom she had set her heart at the age of three; moved to Totnes and became a novelist, winning the Whitbread Book of the Year for her 1993 Theory of War, about a young white boy sold into slavery in post-Civil War America.

It was, in fact, a true story about her own grandfather, the son of a Union veteran and one of “a crop of kids nobody wanted”, as the novel put it. Theory of War was praised by The Spectator as “one of the most remarkable and accomplished fictions to come from these islands perhaps since William Golding’s great seafaring trilogy”, its anger and vast subject compressed into 209 disciplined pages.

The then-unknown Joan Brady beat the other Whitbread category-winners – Andrew Motion, Anne Fine, Rachel Cusk and Carol Ann Duffy – to take Book of the Year, the first woman ever to win it.

It was a small consolation for the curse that Joan Brady believed had been handed down through her family since her grandfather’s slavery. Four of his children committed suicide, including her own father, Robert A Brady, a Marxist economist whose 1937 book The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism sold 40,000 copies in England.

Her mother was Mildred Edie Brady, an economist and journalist celebrated for her debunking of Wilhelm Reich, a pseudoscientist who marketed a wooden box called an “orgone energy accumulator” which he claimed would bathe the naked patient inside it with sexual energy from the cosmos.

Joan, the younger of their two daughters, was born in San Francisco on December 4 1939; her older sister Judy (later Brady Syfers) would become a noted feminist, author of the much-reprinted sarcastic 1971 article “Why I Want a Wife”.

The Brady household was liberated, but not happy. They ran an “Open Door Policy” with their children, which “put sex on a par with voting – adult, important, humdrum if rather fun,” as Joan recalled.

She was three, “sitting splay-legged” on the kitchen floor, when she decided she would marry Dexter Masters, later author of the controversial 1955 anti-nuclear novel, The Accident. “You can’t have him,” laughed her mother. “He’s going to be the husband of my old age.”

But Joan was serious, and pursued Masters single-mindedly, staring at him asleep in the guest bedroom when she was 11. She was attracted to his looks, his charm and the calm he exuded. Her parents’ marriage, by contrast, was marred by tense “discussions”. Her adored father was tormented by depression and, from 1952, incapacitated by a stroke.

Joan Brady found structure in ballet, for which she was prepared to endure the clichéd horrors of bitchiness, anorexia and “half-dollar-size” blood blisters. (Decades later, when her husband was dying, she would find similar solace in the perfection of maths and physics, enrolling at the Open University.) From the San Francisco Ballet School she won a place with Balanchine in New York, a period she recalled in her memoir Prologue.

But her mother, a frustrated thespian, had become increasingly jealous of her daughter’s success on stage. Joan Brady took her revenge by seducing Masters, whom she had realised was her mother’s lover. On the evening of Master’s wife’s funeral, the 19-year-old Joan Brady turned up at his apartment to make him scrambled eggs: the start of a ruthless, and soon successful, courtship.

The ensuing showdown with her mother, on top of her growing stage fright, caused Joan Brady to abandon ballet for a degree in philosophy at Columbia University, although she returned to her brutal regimen aged 38, winning a place with the Paris Ballet. But having proved she was still master of her own body, she turned the place down, preferring a quiet married life in Devon with Masters and their son Alexander, who would later become the acclaimed author of Stuart: A Life Backwards.

Joan Brady had published a 1979 coming-of-age novel called The Impostor but it was only in her 50s, after Masters’s death aged 80 in 1989, that she found her writing voice – encouraged by her Devon friend and neighbour, the late-blooming novelist Mary Wesley.

Fighting the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of America’s Medicare system on Masters’ behalf made her so angry that she wrote a non-fiction polemic about it. No publisher would touch it, but she canalised that rage into rewriting her dormant historical novel, which became Theory of War.

After that novel’s success, she reworked her medical polemic into a novel about Master’s death, entitled Death Comes for Peter Pan (1995), which met with mixed reviews, as did her 1999 comic thriller The Émigré. The promise of Theory of War would never quite be fulfilled.

She never wrote another literary novel, for which she blamed an acrimonious battle with the local council over a next-door shoe factory in Totnes, which had tormented her with noise and poisoned her with solvents, causing nerve damage and numbness, for which she won a settlement of £115,000.

Instead, she moved to Oxford and published a second thriller, Bleedout (2005), which the Telegraph praised for slipping “the noose of the thriller genre’s cliches” and sold over 50,000 copies in the UK, followed by Venom (2010) and The Blue Death (2012).

In 2016, she published America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged, a non-fiction defence of the supposed Communist spy Alger Hiss, whom she had known since 1960.

She is survived by her son Alexander Masters.

Joan Brady, born December 4 1939, died June 13 2024