Forgotten South African novelist

Daphne Rooke, who has died in England at the age of 94, was a South African novelist who is largely forgotten today but was once compared favourably with Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing.

An English critic once declared that of the three, Rooke was the greatest.

The then Sunday Times books editor, Mary Morison Webster, dismissed this as “an unfortunate pronouncement” because their styles were “completely dissimilar”.

But she did agree that, as a story-teller, Rooke left Gordimer and Lessing “far behind”.

One of Rooke’s best-known novels, Ratoons, was “the Wuthering Heights of South African literature”, she wrote.

Set on a sugar farm south of Durban in the early years of the last century, Ratoons (first published in 1953 and re-issued in 1990) is a family saga that provides a searing account of race relations in the colonial era, years before the Nats dreamed up apartheid.

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