CHITTY, Susan Lady (Susan Elspeth nee HOPKINSON) 1929-2021

[Richard R]

She was d of Rudolph (Silas) GLOSSOP 1902-93 by Eirene BOTTING (the writer Antonia WHITE) 1899-1980. She m 1951 Sir Thomas Willes CHITTY 3rd Bt 1926-2014 (the author Thomas Hinde) and had a son (Andrew b 1953 but has not established his claim to the baronetcy) and three daus.

Obit in the Times of 20 Aug 2021:

E X T R A C T
Lady Chitty obituary
Eccentric biographer described as ‘Virginia Woolf without the genius’ whose formative years were as strange as fiction
...Chitty was born Susan Elspeth Hopkinson in 1929 to an unmarried mother, the writer Antonia White, who would be best remembered for her novel Frost in May based on her years at a convent school before the First World War...Her mother, not naturally maternal and herself subject to mental ill-health and violent temper, had wanted a boy, and for some months put her daughter into a children’s home...
...[she] went on to read modern history at Somerville College, Oxford, where she met the man she later married, Thomas Chitty...
...So far she had been known as Susan Hopkinson, after her mother’s third husband, Tom Hopkinson, editor of the Picture Post; her father was a civil engineer called Silas Glossop, with whom she was on friendly terms throughout her life, and occasionally she was known as Susan Glossop.
After her marriage, in 1951, she became Susan Chitty and when her husband, a novelist, inherited a baronetcy on his father’s death in 1955 she became Lady Chitty, nearly always called Lady Susan Chitty in the popular press, causing further confusion...
...Like her mother, she seemed to have a profusion of names and identities and, to add to the mix, her husband used the pen name of Thomas Hinde and occasionally also wrote under his real name. They had a son and three daughters, and tried to give them the stability their own childhoods had lacked: informal cottage life in a Sussex village, pets, riding and homemade amusements... [Sir Thomas] He died in 2014 and their four children survive: Andrew, a philosophy lecturer, Cordelia, a linguist, Miranda, an accountant, and Jessica, who leads a private life.
... To the last Chitty embodied a mixture of convention and free living. Her civil marriage of 1951 was renewed in church many years later. The bride characteristically dressed from head to foot in black leather.
Lady Chitty, biographer, was born on August 18, 1929. She died after a short illness on July 13, 2021, aged 91
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lady-chitty-obituary-k2g9vh3gh

[Richard R]

Obituary from the Telegraph of 25 Aug 2021:

E X T R A C T

Susan Chitty, unsparing biographer of notable Victorians who caused a storm with a literary assassination of her mother Antonia White – obituary

Terrified by her novelist mother, Susan Chitty regretted missing out on ‘that core of security that comes from having a happy childhood’
Susan Chitty, the biographer, who has died aged 91, claimed, with varying degrees of justification, to have discovered the guilty secrets of Charles Kingsley, Edward Lear and Henry Newbolt; yet she provoked the greatest controversy with the posthumous drubbing she gave her mother, the novelist Antonia White.
Antonia White (1899-1980) was a self-confessed neurotic who was certified insane at 23, spent a year in an asylum and fought against mental illness for the rest of her life, finding refuge in psychoanalysis, reckless promiscuity and religion.
Best known for her first novel Frost in May, she wrote four novels and six volumes of diaries about her lovers (of both sexes), her money troubles, her three husbands, her Roman Catholicism and her struggles with writer’s block and with her daughters, Susan and Lyndall, who were born to different fathers.
Susan was the elder of the two, and the first to publish a memoir of Antonia, Now to My Mother (1985), after Antonia’s death. Her introduction set the tone of the book: “Antonia White was not a good mother to me.
“She conceived me out of wedlock, put me in a home for the first year and a half of my life and handed me over to nannies and boarding schools for much of my childhood … a friend once referred to her as a rivet in a cream puff.”
…Antonia had hated her father, the classicist Cecil Botting, after whose death she wrote: “I spit on your corpse. You’re dead and I’m alive. So I’m one up on you now.”
“Cecil Botting,” his grand-daughter speculated, “may have sexually abused Antonia as a child.”
Susan Chitty was born Susan Elspeth White on August 19 1929. Packed off to a residential nursery shortly after she was born, she returned after her mother married Tom Hopkinson, a copywriter with Picture Post.
She assumed Hopkinson was her father, just as he was of her baby sister Lyndall. But at the age of five she was disabused of this belief, when her mother sat her down and asked her: “Now, Darling, if I were to tell you that Tom was not your real father, who do you think is?”
It turned out that she was the daughter of one Silas Glossop – “a handsome man who visited occasionally”. The revelation came as a devastating shock.
…she met her future husband Thomas Chitty, the heir to a baronetcy, about whom Antonia was continually unpleasant, dismissing him as “untalented and unwashed”. … They married in secret in 1951 and, though Susan continued to live on the edge of depression (in Who’s Who she listed her club as “Asylum”), he became her salvation.
…She is survived by her three daughters and a son.
Lady Chitty, born August 18 1929, died July 13 2021
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/08/24/susan-chitty-unsparing-biographer-notable-victorians-caused/