Susan Barnes Crosland was an American journalist and novelist who was resident in London for more than fifty years.
Background
Born Susan Barnes Watson in Baltimore, Maryland, the descendant of passengers on the Mayflower, she was the daughter of Mark Skinner Watson, a defence correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, later the publication"s editor, and Susan Owens who was also a journalist. In 1952 she married Patrick Skene Catling, then working with her father, and relocated to London in 1956 when Catling was posted to the London office of The Baltimore Sun.
Education
She graduated from Vassar College and taught at the Baltimore Museum of Artist
Career
She was the widow of the Labour Party politician Anthony Crosland. By now she had begun to write for British newspapers, originally as Susan Barnes. Following a period on the pre-Murdoch The Sun, Crosland worked for The Sunday Times from 1970.
Noted for her profiles she insisted on not interviewing the wives of "great men" feeling that "they wanted to perpetuate the image".
The interview was eventually published in The Spectator during October 1987. Anthony Crosland had a fatal stroke in February 1977.
She declined, but subsequently wrote a well-received biography of him published in 1982. Resuming her writing career, a biography of Anthony Blunt fell through after Crosland had already spent a third of the advance.
George Weidenfeld, her publisher, suggested a novel instead, the result Ruling Passions appeared in 1989, the first of several works of fiction ending with The Politician"s Wife in 2001.
Crosland also assembled two volumes of collected journalism. By the mid-1980s, Crosland had formed a deep platonic relationship with the conservative journalist Auberon Waugh which lasted until his death in 2001. By then she had begun to suffer from severe arthritis, thought to have had its origins in a riding accident she had suffered at eighteen, and acquired the MRSA bacterium while in hospital having a hip replaced.
The infection went undiagnosed for some time.
Politics
At a party during the year she met Anthony Crosland shortly after The Future of Socialism, his most significant book, had been published.