I only knew Mary Lutyens, the writer who has died aged 90, at the end of her life, but there was nothing of age about her. The past was very real to her, both her own, which was extraordinary, and the more distant past which she chronicled in her biographies. But nothing came between her and her sense of the present - her friends and family, the book she was reading and the book she was writing (often, she remarked, you have to write the book you want to read). All this she enjoyed with curiosity and benevolence.
The past she carried with her to illuminate the present. When we went to see her with a box of amaretti, she was enchanted by the trick of setting fire to the paper wrapper of the macaroons so that it floats up to the ceiling. She responded by performing her father's favourite practical joke involving a box of matches, phantom electricity and a Three Men in a Boat punchline: a moment of high Edwardiana in front of us.
Mary's father, the great architect Edwin Lutyens, was an only intermittently approachable figure, a punster who smelt of the wood shavings of a pencil. After Mary had been at Queen's College, Harley Street, for three years he asked her where she was at school. Some of this distance from his children (there were five, Mary being the youngest) was the result of the chasm between Lutyens and his wife, Lady Emily, daughter of Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India. Where Lutyens was worldly, throwing himself into new projects and encounters, his wife had gradually withdrawn into the narrow focus of theosophy.
She had joined the theosophists not long after Mary was born, and had soon become National Representative of the Order of the Star, Mrs Annie Besant's worldwide organisation preparing for the imminent arrival of the Lord Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future. Theosophy preached tolerance, open-mindedness and individual fulfilment, and this creed, rather than her father's creative genius, shaped Mary's youth and character. When the Theosophical Society realised that Maitreya had incarnated himself in a young boy, Krishnamurti (discovered on a beach in India by the charismatic if suspect 'Bishop' Leadbeater), it was decided to send the boy and his brother Nitya to England for education. Lady Emily took them under her wing, their pale grey Homburg hats and gold-headed canes were a fixture on the hall table, and they were soon part of the family. 'Cowardy cowardy custard,' the Lutyens' children chorused when Krishna entered the nursery, 'your face is the colour of mustard; your hair is black and greasy too, cowardy cowardy custard.' Before she was six Mary had fallen utterly, if secretly, in love with Nitya.
This passion, more than any belief, persuaded Mary to follow the theosophical path, and she went to India with her mother when she was 15. Her stay there was divided between the spiritual, which involved an Indian life style, vegetarianism and an admiration for Gandhi; and the colonial, seen from the very summit of the Raj.
Edwin Lutyens was still building New Delhi and fighting the parsimony of British bureaucrats; Lady Emily's brother Victor was Governor of Bengal. Mary developed a fierce dislike of the Raj, and a love of all things Indian. Her journey culminated in a stay in Sydney, where Leadbeater had established a colony of would-be adepts, whom he would introduce to great masters on the astral plane as they slept. Mary never recalled these journeyings, which were recounted to her by Leadbeater or by his handsome acolyte next morning.
Even Krishnamurti, who had encouraged the Lutyens to go to Sydney, was beginning to have his doubts. (He broke with the Theosophical Society in 1930.) For Mary, whatever the truth of the doctrines, the experience was powerful, and it brought her closer to Nitya. She confessed her love to him, and it was to some extent reciprocated. But Nitya was already weakened with tuberculosis; he died in 1925. Distraught, Mary asked a theosophist leader whether, in his new incarnation, Nitya would remember the past. 'What does that matter?' was the brisk reply. 'He doesn't need to remember the past. All is future now.'
Mary turned her back on mysticism and made her own future in a fine, if forgotten, career as a novelist, and a first marriage to a raffish stockbroker. Her childhood had been spent making up stories, and despite an early aversion to formal education, she was a natural writer.
For much of her life, the morning would be spent in bed writing, researching and reading. A dozen novels, as well as pseudonymous romances, and a children's book, emerged. But despite an appetite for emotional adventure, she did not truly find herself until she met her second husband, Joe Links. Joe, royal furrier, detective novelist, elegant autodidact, was 'everything a man should be', and the happiness of their 50 years of marriage was the most abiding impression of them. 'Joe made me nice again,' Mary said. He also opened her eyes to new possibilities in her work.
Always a great admirer of John Ruskin, Joe took Mary to Venice for their honeymoon, and they were soon hard at work on the letters that Effie wrote home from her own ill-fated honeymoon there with Ruskin in 1848. The result was Effie in Venice (1965), edited with all of Mary's sympathy for both sides of a human dilemma. Millais and the Ruskins (1967), and The Ruskins and the Grays (1972), followed, the former one of the best books on Victorian painting ever written. Their fascination with Venice led to Joe's second career as the supreme writer on Canaletto and author of Venice for Pleasure. Happiness with Joe allowed Mary to make contact again with the influences of her youth. She wrote memoirs up to the death of Nitya, To Be Young (1959), and renewed her links with Krishnamurti, whose disparate talks she edited into coherent books and whose life she tackled in a three-volume biography (1975-1988). She kept an open mind about spiritual experiences; Joe, no mystic, shared a passion for fine silk ties with Krishna.
In the 1970s, Mary helped with the great Lutyens exhibition, arranging the reconstructed studios, and writing a biography. For the first time she read her parents' letters and realised how the rift between them had been caused by sex. Their marriage night was 'a nightmare of physical pain and emotional disappointment' as Lady Emily wrote. Mary's book, her finest, was loving and utterly open and fair: it revealed the whole character of her life.
Joe Links died in 1997. Mary is survived by the daughter of her first marriage.
Mary Lutyens, writer, born July 31, 1908; died April 9, 1999