Ruth Prawer Jhabvala manuscripts, 1975-1976

Collection

Identifier: 1980-004

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

Consist of handwritten drafts of the short stories, "Desecration" and "How I Became a Holy Mother," published in How I Became a Holy Mother and Other Stories, 1976; the play, "A Lost Cause," [date unknown]; and the novel, Heat and Dust, (1975), all written in three manuscript notebooks with multiple notes and draft fragments clipped to the pages and notes laid in.

Dates

Creation: 1975 - 1976

Creator

Jhabvala, Ruth Prawer, 1927-2013 (Author, Person)

Conditions Governing Access

This material is open for research use by any registered reader. This material is housed off-site and will require advance notice of 1 business day for use.

Use and Copyright

This material is owned by the University of Tulsa, McFarlin Library, Department of Special Collections. Unpublished manuscripts are under copyright. Therefore, permission to publish, quote, or reproduce must be secured from both the repository and the copyright holder.

Biographical / Historical

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, CBE (7 May 1927 – 3 April 2013) was a German-born British and American Booker prize-winning novelist, short story writer and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter. She is perhaps best known for her long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions, made up of director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant.

After meeting Cyrus Jhabvala in England, she married him and moved to India in 1951; Jhabvala was an Indian-Parsi architect. The couple lived in New Delhi and had three daughters. Jhabvala began then to elaborate her experiences in India and wrote novels and tales on Indian subjects. She wrote a dozen novels, 23 screenplays, and eight collections of short stories and was made a CBE in 1998 and granted a joint fellowship by BAFTA in 2002 with Ivory and Merchant. She is the only person to have won both a Booker Prize and an Oscar.