The poet, novelist and short-story writer Georgina Hammick, who has died aged 83, gave fine-tuned expression to her moment in English culture, writing with wit and insight about class and sexual politics and change. Her published output was small – two volumes of stories, two novels – because, although writing was at the centre of her life, she suffered painfully from self-doubt; and yet her hard-won prose reads effortlessly. It is stylish and elegant and funny.
Georgie began writing as a poet in the 1970s; she loved poetry, knew reams of it off by heart, and found the companionship of poets congenial. But it was in the short stories and novels that her wry delicacy and irony came into their own, made substantial in her middle-class characters. These are often women, sharply observant and intelligent, comically uncomfortable inside traditions of femininity which no longer fit, yet unable to escape them.
