Joan Olivia Wyndham (11 October 1921, East Knoyle, Wiltshire, UK – 8 April 2007, London) was a British writer and memoirist who rose to literary prominence late in life through the diaries she had kept more than 40 years earlier, which were an account of her romantic adventures during the Second World War, when she was an attractive teenager who had strayed into London's Bohemian set. Her literary reputation rests on Love Lessons (1985) and Love Is Blue (1986), two selections from her diaries which led one critic to call her "a latterday Pepys in camiknickers."
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Wyndham's mother, Iris Bennett, was an ex-débutante, and her father, Guy Richard Charles ("Dick") Wyndham (1896–1948), son of Guy Percy Wyndham, was an aristocrat whose ancestors included Lord Edward FitzGerald, the 18th-century Irish revolutionary. Her parents' marriage was failing by the time Joan was born in 1922.
Her early years were spent in the Wiltshire countryside. The family estate, Clouds, later became a rehabilitation clinic for alcoholics and drug addicts. Caught "in flagrante" with the Marchioness of Queensbury, Wyndham's father followed the custom of the period by registering at a hotel in Brighton where he arranged for a private detective to photograph him in bed with a prostitute, rather than embarrass his lover. Her father, Dick Wyndham, would be shot dead by a sniper while covering the 1948 Arab-Israeli war for the Sunday Times. After the divorce, mother and daughter went to live in west London, at # 22 Evelyn Gardens, off Fulham Road, and sought solace in devout Roman Catholicism. Together, they attended Mass every day and confession once a week. Joan was sent to a Catholic boarding school where she developed a passion for the theatre.
In 1938 Joan won a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), but the impending war forced RADA to close down for the duration. The 17-year-old Wyndham soon volunteered to train as a nurse. Towards the end of 1941, she was drafted into the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and sent to a base in Suffolk. From there, she made trips to London, where she got to know Dylan Thomas, Julian Maclaren-Ross, M.J. Tambimuttu and other such bohemians.
Shortly after the war she married Maurice Rowdon, with whom she had a daughter, Clare. When her husband landed a lecturership in Baghdad, Wyndham accompanied him and remained in Iraq for two years. An affair with their London lodger, Shura Shivarg, a Jewish academic of Russian descent who had grown up in pre-Communist China, led to an amicable divorce and second marriage, which also produced a daughter, Camilla.
Following a stint as a restaurant critic for What's On? (a precursor of Time Out), she moved to Oxford, where she set up the city's first espresso bar. Gravitating back to London, she worked as a sub-editor for The Housewife magazine. In the 1960s she ran a hippie restaurant on Portobello Road and catered for many of the major pop festivals. She went on to work at the Royal Court Theatre, cooking for the actors. Eventually one of her daughters found her wartime diaries and encouraged her mother to edit and publish them. They were eventually acquired by William Heinemann, Ltd. and released in 1985 under the title Love Lessons, followed by a sequel, Love Is Blue. 'Love Lessons' was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in 2003, with Emilia Fox as Joan.
Joan Wyndham died of cancer in 2007, aged 85, survived by her two daughters. Her first and second husbands were still alive as well at the time of her death.
Between publishing Love is Blue and her death, Wyndham produced Anything Once (1992), another volume of diaries, and Dawn Chorus (2004), a memoir of her childhood and early adolescence.