Emma Tennant - Biography

Biography

Tennant is of Scottish extraction, the daughter of Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner and Elizabeth Lady Glenconner. She is the niece of Edward Wyndham Tennant and Stephen Tennant, and the sister of Colin Tennant, 3rd Baron Glenconner.

Born in London, she was educated at St Paul's Girls' School and spent the World War II years and her childhood summers at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her family also owned estates in Trinidad. Tennant remembers her father as a mix of rage and benevolence, and these memories may have influenced her fiction.

Tennant grew up in the modish London of the 1950s and 1960s. She worked as a travel writer for Queen magazine and an editor for Vogue, publishing her first novel, The Colour of Rain, under a pseudonym when she was twenty-six. Between 1975 and 1979, she edited a literary magazine, Bananas, which helped launch the careers of several young novelists.

A large number of books by Tennant have followed: thrillers, children’s books, fantasies, and several revisionist takes on classic novels, including a sequel to Pride and Prejudice called Pemberley. In later years, she began to treat her own life in such books as Girlitude and Burnt Diaries (both published in 1999), the second of which details her affair with Ted Hughes. The French Dancer's Bastard, which recounts the life of Adele, the daughter of Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre, was published in October 2006. The Autobiography of the Queen, written with Hilary Bailey, was published in October 2007.

Tennant has been married four times, including to the journalist and author Christopher Booker between 1963 and 1968 and the political writer Alexander Cockburn between 13 December 1968 and 1973. She has two daughters and a son, author Matthew Yorke. In April 2008, she married her partner of 33 years, Tim Owens, saying it was for tax reasons.