Pat Barr (writer)

Pat Barr (25 April 1934 – 20 March 2018) was a British novelist, writer of social history and journalist. She was born in Norwich, attended Norwich High School for Girls and studied English at the University of Birmingham. She worked as a teacher at Yokohama International School in Japan. She also studied for a master's degree from University College London.

Career
In the 1960s Barr was Assistant Secretary of the National Old People's Welfare Council. In this role she wrote The Elderly: Handbook on Care and Services (1968), and edited a book of older people's memories of their childhoods, I Remember: An Arrangement for Many Voices (1970).

Barr's history books include:


 * The Coming of the Barbarians: A Story of Western Settlement in Japan, 1853-1870 (1967)
 * The Deer Cry Pavilion: A Story of Westerners in Japan, 1868–1905 (1988)
 * A Curious Life for a Lady: The Story of Isabella Bird, A Remarkable Victorian Traveller (1970)
 * Foreign Devils: Westerners in the Far East, the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day (1970)
 * To China With Love: The Lives and Times of Protestant Missionaries in China 1860-1900 (1972)
 * The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (1976)
 * Taming the Jungle: The Men Who Made British Malaya (1977)
 * The Dust in the Balance: British Women in India, 1905-1945 (1989)

Her first novel, written jointly with her husband John Barr under the pen name Laurence Hazard, was The Andean Murders (1960).

Her other novels include:


 * Chinese Alice (1981) (American title: Jade)
 * Uncut Jade (1983)
 * Kenjiro: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Japan (1985)
 * Coromandel (1988)

Four of her novels were bestsellers.

Barr was active as a feminist and as a member of the Women in Media group. She contributed a chapter, "Newspapers", to Is This Your Life?: Images of Women in the Media (1977), and wrote The Framing of the Female (1978). She also wrote for the feminist magazine Spare Rib.

Barr died in Norwich in 2018.