Best-Selling Novelist Storm Jameson at Age 95

Storm Jameson, whose novels dealing with ethical dilemmas were best sellers in the 1930s and ‘40s, has died in Cambridge, her publishers said this week.

They said she was 95 and had died from natural causes on Sept. 30.

An ardent feminist, Margaret Storm Jameson was born into a family of shipbuilders and mariners who had lived for 600 years in Whitby, Yorkshire. She used their activities as the background for a long sequence of novels, including the trilogy “The Lovely Ship,” “The Voyage Home” and “A Richer Dust.”

One of her heroines, Margaret Hervey, was a shipbuilder.

Her first book, a novel called “The Pot Boils,” appeared in 1920 and her last, about the French novelist Stendhal, in 1979. Her 1969 autobiography, “Journey From the North,” described her travels, meetings and conversations in Europe before and after World War II.

In 1936, novelist Howard Spring said that her writing had “integrity and skill,” and described her as “the most important woman novelist in England today.”

With writer Rebecca West, Miss Jameson was a vigorous supporter of women’s independence in the 1920s and was a friend of H.G. Wells, the visionary writer who supported the feminist movement.

Anti-Fascist Causes

She was active in anti-fascist causes in the 1930s, and her work in helping writers flee Nazi Germany led to her election as the first woman president of the English center of International P.E.N., the world association of writers.

During and after World War II Miss Jameson wrote a series of novels with French backgrounds, the most acclaimed being “Cousin Honore.”

She was inspired to the theme by her husband’s knowledge of France. He was soldier and historian Guy Chapman, who wrote an important biography of Alfred Dreyfus, the French-Jewish soldier whose wrongful imprisonment caused a scandal in the 1890s.

Four of her novels, including “Company Parade” and “Women against Men,” were reissued in 1982 by the feminist publishers Virago.

“I thought she was a real professional and in the front rank as a novelist, although she didn’t always enjoy the critical esteem that she deserved,” said Tim Farmiloe, a director of Macmillan’s publishers.

Miss Jameson said in 1982 that she was appalled to have lived so long.

“It’s almost indecent,” she told an interviewer. “I must have committed some sin. Much finer and more splendid people are allowed to die. You ought to be able to knock on the door and say, ‘Please, I’ve had enough.’ ”