Isabel Quigly: Translator of Italian, Spanish and French literature

An outstanding Cambridge scholar, she got a job at Penguin and went on to become a Booker judge and film critic for the Spectator

Quigly's one and only novel, 'The Eye of Heaven', was widely praised for its honesty and its vivid Italian atmosphere

Isabel Quigly was an outstanding translator, particularly from Italian but also from Spanish and French, of more than 100 books.

She translated Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Contini and Morante’s Arturo’s Island as well as works by Cassola, Ginzburg, Fellini, Pope John Paul I, and Simenon.

A prolific correspondent, with many cherished friends from childhood onwards, Isabel will be remembered as a person of boundless affection and for her sense of fun, as well as for her humility and strong religious belief.

She was born on 17 September 1926 in Ontaneda, a small village in Spain south of Santander, where her father, an engineer of Irish descent, was concerned with building a railway.

The local priest insisted on christening her Isabel, maintaining that her real name, Elizabeth, did not exist. She and her elder sister, Cita, were educated at the Godolphin School, Salisbury, and the Convent of the Assumption, Kensington Square, where the headmistress was the much loved mother superior, Margaret Mary McFarlin, later confidante of Siegfrid Sassoon.

A fellow pupil and friend was the future Duchess of Alba; another pupil was Rosemary, daughter of the American ambassador Joseph Kennedy, who on the declaration of war with Germany invited Cita and Isabel to America as the family’s guests.

The Quigly parents decided against this last, because of the danger of the U-boats. The convent school was evacuated to the family seat of the Actons, Aldenham Park in Shropshire, where Monsignor Ronald Knox had retreated to work on his translation of the bible. His haven of peace was broken by the arrival of some 50 girls and their luggage, with attendant nuns and lay mistresses.

There were plenty of high spirits at Aldenham, Mother Margaret Mary even dancing the charleston with skirts hitched up. In one game Isabel was “taken prisoner’’ on an upper floor and escaped on knotted sheets, unfortunately passing a nun’s window.

From 1944-1947 Isabel was at Newnham College Cambridge, winning five scholarships and a first class honours, thereby relieving her parents’ financial worries.

From 1948-1951 she worked as an assistant editor at Penguin, where she became friendly with Alan Glover, an extraordinary man whom she was to describe as the main influence on her literary life.

Attractive, with dark hair and Irish looks, she became engaged to a South African and duly set out with her wedding dress packed – first to Florence, in order to stay with Cita.

There she met a handsome and successful sculptor, about 10 years her senior, Raffaelo Salimbeni, from an aristocratic Sienese family. They fell passionately in love and the sequence of events became a matter of wonder among friends, largely because of her semi-autobiographical (but oddly prophetic) best-selling novel, The Eye of Heaven, published in 1955 by Collins; and as The Exchange of Joy by Harcourt Brace in America.

The book was much praised by novelists Elizabeth Bowen and Leonard Strong, among others, for its honesty in descriptions of total love and its vivid Italian atmosphere. But all its characters were recognisably based on living people, so publication in Italy became impossible.

The book was written in six weeks while she was on a trilingual job for the Red Cross in Switzerland. She and Raffaelo married and had a son, but separated, possibly in part for financial reasons, but as she much later admitted because of differences in temperament, which are clear when one rereads The Eye of Heaven.

Nevertheless they continued to correspond frequently and a “trunkful’’ of letters contained one of 80 pages from Raffaelo. He died in 1991, and although it seems they only met again once and briefly, Isabel was terribly distressed. A letter from him arrived after his death.

From 1956 to 1966 Isabel was a film critic on The Spectator. In 1956 she selected and introduced the Penguin book Shelley: Selected Poetry, still in print. She also reviewed extensively and in 1968 published a book on Charlie Chaplin’s early comedies, also a booklet on Pamela Hansford Johnson for the Arts Council.

She became a member of the Council of the Society of Authors and was on the Arts Council Committee for Literature. Later she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was on its Council, and she was also on the Committee of English PEN. In 1982 Chatto & Windus published her The Heirs of Tom Brown, a brilliant, perceptive and entertaining book on boys’ school stories from the 1840s to 1914, with chapters on the cult of games, love affairs and the boarding school as a training ground for the empire. With Susan Hill she selected and edited a Penguin book of short stories.

From 1958 she lived in a cottage, full of character, at Fletching in Sussex. Her son, Crispin, was a delightful and lively child, remembered as “elfin-like’’. They were inseparable. At Cambridge he studied law but became interested in property, at first doing all the manual repairs himself. Isabel is recalled melting lead for him in a saucepan and arriving at her publisher Chatto with red-stained hands because, she said, she had been bricklaying.

From 1986 to 1997 she was literary adviser then literary editor on The Tablet, which she immensely enjoyed. Colleagues there were amused by her frugality, searching wastepaper baskets for unfranked stamps and postcards that would be useful for home-made Christmas cards, also for the way she went about without shoes, not caring about the holes in her stockings.

She worked voluntarily for organisations mainly in Sussex concerned with children, the handicapped, old-age pensioners and prisoners. A children’s hospital was founded as a result of an article she had written in The Spectator. She campaigned hard for the release of the daughters of Haile Selassie whom she had known at Cambridge (in 1974 they were imprisoned when their father was deposed).

She was a judge for many literary prizes such as the Heinemann Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1982 there was a row reported in Private Eye between her and Bernice Rubens, a fellow Booker judge, on account of Isabel’s very last minute decision which tipped the balance in favour of Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils against Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone, Bernice’s choice.

From 1995-97 she was archivist at the Royal Society of Literature, which resulted in her book on its history, The Royal Society Of Literature: A Portrait, in 2000. Failing health involved having to leave Fletching, to her great regret, but it enabled her to see more of her talented grandsons Hugh, Guy and George.

Elizabeth (Isabel) Madeleine Quigly, literary critic and author, born Ontaneda, Spain, 17 September 1926, literary critic, died Haywards Heath 14 September 2018

Raleigh Trevelyan​ died in 2014