Josephine Hart in a few words

Josephine Hart, who died last Thursday, was a master of minimalist fiction and a ringmaster of poetry. She produced six intense and personal novels, including Damage (filmed in 1992 by Louis Malle with Jeremy Irons), and many hundreds of hours of equally spare, precise and passionate readings of poems. When Bono and Bob Geldof growled out W.B. Yeats, Harold Pinter intoned Philip Larkin, Sir Roger Moore played Kipling and the darkest parts of T.S. Eliot became clear in the voices of Edward Fox, Jeremy Irons and Dame Eileen Atkins, it could only be at one of Josephine Hart's Poetry Hours, performances in libraries and theatres before audiences of devoted students and fashionable society, each show under Hart's firm and knowing directions, all of them written in the famed black-bound book that always sat on her knee.

Hart was an unmistakable figure in London for thirty years. She was never seen in the city unless dressed in black and white, usually demure and by Chanel, always on performance days in the same pompom-heeled 'lucky shoes': colour was only for the country. She could persuade and charm as few others could — even in places where such powers counted for the most. Her deep, close second marriage to the advertising agency creator and Conservative political strategist, Maurice Saatchi, placed her at the centre of power in the Thatcher era and beyond. But her own power was devoted to an iconic style of prose, expressed both in commercially successful novels and fictions that she knew would never sell so well — and to ensuring that the best of poetry in English be heard by audiences as well as read.

Josephine Hart was born in 1942 in Ireland in Mullingar, County Westmeath, the daughter of parents whose business was the ownership of a garage but whose legacy to their bookish daughter included a catalogue of family catastrophes. Three siblings died, two of them within six months of each other when she was seventeen years old. Her last novel, The Truth About Love (2009), which sets the history of modern Ireland against a family struggling with dismemberment in all its forms, came as close as she ever did to addressing directly these tragedies. Damage, which was her first novel and a worldwide best-seller, told of a successful but purposeless politician who meets destruction through a woman who warns him of the deeper truths that he cannot see: 'Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive'.

Hart was a pupil at Mullingar Catholic schools where the learning and reading aloud of poetry was compulsory — and writing, too, was praised and encouraged as God's work. She lost her convent Catholicism but kept the nuns' belief in the transformative power of poetry — for good and ill. She considered an acting career herself but instead chose an early life that did not put emotion in the fore. If life could be damaging so could art. She became a businesswoman, rising to be a director of the Haymarket publishing company where her first husband, Paul Buckley, also worked. She had two sons — Adam, from that first marriage, and Edward from her second. She produced West End plays. When she began her first staged readings of poetry — at a Cork Street art gallery in 1987 — she applied a seriousness to the project, both of inspiration and organisation, that made things happen that had seemed impossible before.

Would great actors work for no pay before small audiences reading Milton and Gerard Manley Hopkins and writers who rarely figure in a life on stage? They would, it seemed, if Josephine Hart asked them to. In 2005 Sir Roger Moore gave a rendering of Kipling's ballad The Mary Gloster at The British Library: the Hollywood star had not quite been expecting to perform a piece that was quite so long; the audience, made up of sceptics and the star-struck, was barely more certain what would transpire. Under Hart's hardest gaze, Moore proved his seemingly effortless power over Kipling's story of the helpless shipping magnate disappointed in his son, using no accents, no grand gestures or regional burrs — and left the rows of his watchers in tears. When Kenneth Cranham took on the Kipling duties (he had met Hart through a shared passion for Elvis Presley) it was as an equally potent, but very different, character part. Harold Pinter was never offered Kipling; Hart knew who would do what and why. Pinter did Larkin; before he died he was working on W.B. Yeats for a new Poetry Hour performance that never took place.

A controlled encouragement of variety was the key to Hart's productions on stage. When Bob Geldof had his rock star's pick of early Yeats — "The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun" – there was the sight and sound of crouching concentration. The Boomtown Rat and campaigner for Africa was allowed to luxuriate before his fans in the familiarity of "I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams". When the classical actor Sinead Cusack took over, she gave the "The Circus Animals' Desertion" a more classic tone: "Now that my ladder's gone, / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart".

In the Ireland of Hart's youth there had been 'Holy hours' when it was wiser not to be seen entering or leaving a bar and when the trapped drinkers would perform – each to their own individual standard of excellence under the landlord's guidance. To some this was the key to her style – as much as were the convent and the classroom. She understood well the perils of production. In her skeletal third novel, Oblivion (1995), there is a gruesome scene in which a director sets out his skills before a documentary-making journalist, showing how he fires up his stars into "giving life to the dead". Not every one of her performances was a masterpiece. Not every actor repaid Hart's faith in his or her power to make poetry understood. But so many did so – and surprised even themselves in what they did. She made the most insecure feel secure. Thanks to CDs sent free to all British schools, the proof of that will live on.

Josephine Hart died on Thursday afternoon of a cancer whose existence few of even her closest friends had known. She recognised herself as a connoisseur of death and had chosen her way to meet it. Four hours later, on the bare black bricked stage of the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, it was the actor, Deborah Findlay, who carried on stage the familiar black binder with the names of Larkin, Milton and T.S. Eliot. And with her was Cranham, representing the older generation of her cast, and Ruth Wilson and Rupert Evans representing the younger, and with them all Max Irons, son of Jeremy Irons and Cusack, probably the most regular of all Hart's players over three decades. There was a short, shocked exhalation from the audience when the news of the death was announced. Then there were readings, as planned, of war poetry – by Yeats, Owen, Sassoon, Brooke and epitaphs by Kipling.