Felicity Bryan obituary
Dynamic literary agent with an extraordinary gift
for nurturing new talent
Liz Thomson
Mon 22 Jun 2020
Felicity
Bryan had a bulging contacts book, which included such names as Francis Crick,
James Naughtie, Lucy Worsley, Roy Strong, Mary Berry, Carlos Acosta, Diarmaid
MacCulloch and Edmund de Waal
Felicity
Bryan, who has died of cancer aged 74, was the founder in 1988 of the
distinguished literary agency Felicity Bryan
Associates.
She was liked and respected in equal measures in the world in which she had
worked since 1972, when she joined Curtis Brown.
Becoming
a literary agent was a chance move, an early third act seemingly unrelated to
what had gone before, yet for which her prior careers, as art historian and
journalist, were the perfect preparation. Her fellow agent Andrew
Nurnberg observed:
“Ultimately, you need to discover and burnish quality, which Felicity did. She
had this extraordinary ability to find authors. She was smart as a whip and
straight as a die.”
Bryan
had an intense curiosity about every aspect of life and a gift for friendship
which resulted in a bulging contacts book – which included such names as Francis Crick, James Naughtie, Lucy Worsley, Roy Strong, Mary
Berry, Carlos Acosta, Diarmaid MacCulloch and Edmund de Waal.
Her
personal passions were art, opera, dance and gardening, on which she wrote two
books: The Town Gardener’s Companion (1981), based on columns she wrote as
gardening correspondent of the London Evening Standard, and A Garden for
Children (with Elisabeth Luard, 1986). However, she ranged widely, an
intellectual who wore her erudition lightly and found her metier in Oxford,
where she set up her fledgling agency when marriage and motherhood rendered her
commute to London tiresome.
In
those days, few agents struck out on their own, certainly not women and doing
so outside London went against the grain. But FBA prospered,
making stars of many who might otherwise have remained cloistered beneath the
city’s dreaming spires.
Bryan
did not want to be “provincial” – indeed, was determined to be truly
international, spending time in far-flung markets. Within a few years, she had
made her mark: Rosamunde Pilcher, who had followed Bryan from Curtis Brown, broke
out of her romantic fiction niche with The Shell Seekers, knocking The Bonfire
of the Vanities from its perch atop the US bestsellers.
Karen Armstrong, a new signing, provided Bryan with her first
international non-fiction bestseller, A History of God (1994). And Iain Pears,
a local art historian and journalist, sold in a score of languages with his
novel An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997).
“I
think with my nose,” Bryan liked to say. Critically and commercially, FBA was
set fair and, in 2001, Catherine Clarke joined from Oxford University Press, her
representation of AC Grayling and Michael Wood, and the children’s
authors Meg Rosoff and David Almond, opening a new chapter.
Bryan
was born in Sowerby Bridge, West Yorkshire, the second of three daughters of
Paul Bryan, a war hero who served for three decades as a Tory MP, and his wife,
Betty (nee Hoyle). The girls were educated at Benenden school in Kent,
“naughty, rebellious” Felicity joining when her sister, Elizabeth, was deputy
head girl.
Their
childhood was overshadowed by their mother’s bipolar disorder, which also
affected Felicity’s daughter Alice, who took her own life aged 22. Bryan became a
trustee of Equilibrium:
The Bipolar Foundation.
The sisters were all achievers: Elizabeth a paediatrician, founded the Multiple Births
Foundation. Bernadette was among the first women to be ordained. Both died
young, sharing the BRCA gene that can increase the chance of developing cancer.
The cancer that killed Felicity was her fourth.
Bryan
was open about fate’s cruelties but never self-pitying. “On to the next
disaster,” she would joke, as she planned practically for the long-term future
of FBA.
Unsurprisingly,
she was not given to introspection, preferring to be busy and living for those she
had lost, powered by five hours’ sleep a night. She adored publishing parties
and had time for everyone, giving people her undivided attention. “She would
always find some spark, something you had in common,” Clarke observed. The
publisher Andrew
Franklin talks of “a
genuine original and a very tough businesswoman who had enormous amounts of
fun”.
Bryan
graduated as an art historian from the Courtauld Institute in London and began
her career as an assistant on Burlington Magazine. It felt “limiting” to her,
so she wrote to several Washington correspondents asking if they might need
extra help in election year.
Joe Rogaly of the Financial Times offered her $100 a
week plus extra for anything written in her own time if she could be in DC in
two weeks. She arrived in a city still smoking following the death of Martin
Luther King in 1968 and stayed an exhilarating and life-changing two years,
building up a portfolio of serious journalism and making lasting friendships.
Among
them was the Washington Post reporter Larry Stern, in whose memory she founded
the Laurence Stern fellowship with the Post’s Ben Bradlee and the Observer’s Godfrey Hodgson. Over 40
years, fellows have included Cathy Newman, Gary Younge and
Jonathan Freedland. This month, it was renamed the Stern-Bryan fellowship in her honour.
Loving
the US, Bryan was torn when in 1970 she was offered a full-time position in
London on the Economist. She accepted the offer, splurging $1,500 on a
round-the-world ticket and sending a final FT dispatch from Laos. She wrote
prodigiously for the magazine’s British and American Surveys, invented the Arts
Briefs, and joined Women in Media to help encourage more women into the man’s
world of serious journalism.
When Graham Watson of Curtis Brown rang, she assumed it was to
offer thoughts about Welsh industry for the piece she was writing, but it was
an invitation to drinks at the Ritz to discuss his proposal that she inject new
lifeblood into the fusty agency. This she did, launching a publishing
revolution in the process by persuading the Royal Horticultural Society to
partner with Dorling Kindersley to create a series of gardening titles. Hardy
perennials now widely imitated, they have sold millions. She established Berry
as an author with Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbook (sales now two million-plus)
and reinvented Strong as he stepped down from the V&A, proposing The Story
of Britain, still popular more than 20 years on.
Personally
and professionally, Bryan was a born matchmaker who, said Nurnberg, “never had
to pitch a book – it was all down to her irrepressible enthusiasm and personal
presentation”.
Armstrong
recalls that “Felicity never gave up”, despite her proposal for A History of
God arousing “absolutely no interest with any publisher … And somehow her
serene and breezy confidence gave me the courage, inspiration - and imperative
– to work and write in quite a different way.”
Bryan
was appointed MBE this year and announced her retirement earlier this month.
She
is survived by her second husband, the economist Alex Duncan, whom she married
in 1981, and two sons, Maxim and Benjamin. Her first marriage, to Alasdair
Clayre, ended in divorce.
• Felicity
Anne Bryan, literary agent, born 16 October 1945; died 21 June 2020