RABAN, Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx (1942- 2023)

[colinp]

The writer Jonathan Raban has died -  Jonathan Raban, self-scrutinising travel writer and novelist of originality and humour – obituary (telegraph.co.uk)

He was the son of Rev (James) Peter Caplin Priaulx RABAN (1918-1996) and Monica Vivienne nee SANDERSON (1918-?).  He m (1) 1964 (div) Bridget Johnson (2) 1985 (div 1990) Caroline Alice Celia b 1940 dau of Maj Harold David CUTHBERT (d 1959) (sometime Head of that gentry family of Beaufront Castle, BLG1952) and (m as her 1st h 1931, div 1944) Bridget Sybil (1910- 2010), sometime Lady in Waiting to HRH the late Princess Royal, dau of Capt Sir Edward Clive MILNES-COATES, 2nd Baronet OBE (1879-1971) and (m 1906) Lady Celia Hermione CREWE-MILNES (1884-1985) dau of the 1st and last Marquess of Crewe, and (3) 1992 Jean LENIHAN

EXTRACTS:

Jonathan Raban, self-scrutinising travel writer and novelist of originality and humour – obituary

In works combining candid memoir and travelogue, he wrote ‘about place’ and how people fit (or do not fit) in

Jonathan Raban, who has died aged 80, was an author who delighted in blurring the boundaries between genres, blending fact, fiction, travelogue, sociology, historical anecdote, reportage, memoir, confessional and literary criticism, and creating a style entirely his own.....

Jonathan Raban was born on June 14 1942 at Hempton, Norfolk to Peter and Monica Raban. His father was an Anglican vicar and stern traditionalist who represented to his son “England... the Conservative party in person, the Army in person, the church in person, the public school system in person”......

He married Bridget Johnson in 1964; the marriage was dissolved in the mid-1970s. He married Caroline Cuthbert, an art curator, in 1985; the marriage ended in 1990. In 1992 he married Jean Lenihan, a journalist; they had one daughter. They separated in 1997, the moment minutely recorded in Passage To Juneau.

Jonathan Raban, born June 14 1942, died January 17 2023

[Richard R]

Obit in the Times of 30 Jan 2023:

E X T R A C T

Jonathan Raban obituary

Seafaring, quixotic and nomadic writer whose genre-defying books reflected a sense of dislocation he had felt since childhood

… He was born Jonathan Mark Hamilton Priaulx Raban in Norfolk in 1942, one of four brothers of Monica and the Rev Canon Peter Raban. Raised in a series of vicarages with cold flagstone floors, musty larders and echoing corridors, he grew up, he later reflected, with a sentimentalised vision of Old England.

His father, a probationary teacher, left to fight in the war and Jonathan was raised largely by his mother, who volunteered with the wartime ambulance service and wrote short stories for women’s magazines — usually tales of romance set in the countryside..

… They were an aspirational middle-class family and he never forgot being reprimanded for playing with the local children.

 “It was my first explicit introduction to my parents’ world of anxious class divisions and distinctions,” he recalled. “In no uncertain terms, it announced that my lot would be to stand behind a wall of separating glass, on the outside, looking in…”

… By the late 1980s Raban’s second marriage, to Caroline Cuthbert, an art dealer, was breaking apart (his first to Bridget Johnson, a Hull student, was dissolved in the 1970s) and he decided to emigrate to America…

… Raban eventually moved to Seattle and married Jean Lenihan in 1992, a journalist and dance critic…Jean left him in 1997. He is survived by their daughter, Julia, with whom he lived in Seattle in the later part of his life…

Jonathan Raban, seafarer and writer, was born on June 14, 1942. He died of complications from a stroke on January 17, 2023, aged 80

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jonathan-raban-obituary-nbzr5cwkg