Gina Berriault; Short Story Writer, Novelist

Gina Berriault, who won the National Book Critics Circle and Pen Faulkner awards in 1997 for her collection of short stories “Women in Their Beds,” has died.

The 73-year-old Berriault, a longtime resident of Northern California, died in Sausalito on July 15 after a brief illness.

Throughout her career, critical notices for Berriault were generally positive, while book sales were not. Andre Dubus called her “a splendid but unheralded writer.” Another critic, Molly McQuade, writing in the Chicago Tribune, lamented that Berriault’s work had not “met with a splashy success or even with the sustained respect that it deserves.”

Her lack of fame may have been fostered by her general demeanor, which one fellow writer described as “painfully shy.”

In a four-decade writing career, her output totaled four novels and three collections of short stories. At the time of her death, she had just completed writing and illustrating a fable, “The Great Petrowski.”

She adapted one of her short stories, “The Stone Boy,” for the screen. The story described the trauma of a young boy who accidentally kills his brother in a hunting accident. Afterward he is unable to articulate his grief or get comfort from his immediate family. He is only able to connect with his grandfather. It became the 1984 film of the same name starring Robert Duvall and Glenn Close.

Berriault was born Arline Shandling in 1926 to parents who had immigrated to Long Beach from Latvia and Lithuania. Her father, a writer and editor of trade magazines, encouraged her early interest in fiction. His death when she was in her teens forced her to continue his work to help support the family, which had settled in the Los Angeles area.

During the 1950s, she married John Berriault, a musician, with whom she had one child, a daughter. That marriage ended in divorce.

Her writing career progressed in the ‘50s, and by the early 1960s, her stories began to appear in leading magazines, literary journals and “best” short story collections. Her first novel, “The Descent,” appeared in 1960. It was followed by “A Conference of Victims,” which was revised and republished in 1998 under the title “Afterwards.” Other novels include “The Son,” and “The Lights of Earth.” Her short stories were collected in “The Mistress” and the “The Infinite Passion of Expectation.”

To support her writing, Berriault took odd jobs as a waitress and a clerk before finally landing a position as a creative writing teacher at San Francisco State.

While generally best known and admired as a short story writer, Berriault received critical praise for “The Lights of Earth.” The story centered on the life of Ilona Lewis, a San Francisco writer, whose relationship with her lover, Martin Vandersen, is threatened after he finds success as an author and with that success, a love for another woman.

In a review for the New York Times, Elizabeth Spencer called the writing sensuous, and the texture “closely woven in colors that, though muted, form a memorable design.”

Berriault’s writing often dealt with ordinary people in crisis situations.

“Each of Gina Berriault’s stories contains a world, beautifully illuminated by the light of the life within it,” novelist Robert Stone said. “Her writing, line for line, is the most emotionally precise I know, and her stories are among the wisest and most heartbreaking in American fiction.”

She is survived by her daughter, Julie Berriault, and by her longtime companion, writer Leonard Gardner.