In later life, she avoided interviews wherever possible. If cornered on a park bench or in the greasy spoon café where she worked (J.K. Rowling was not the first), she would direct the conversation away from herself and on to God. Her musings on spirituality and her lifelong search for clarity – “only one thing must be cast out and that is the vague”, she once said – were what principally concerned her.

At a recent books festival event, I was part of a panel of biographers on stage. Who, we were asked, are the subjects waiting to be “done”? Most of the names to emerge were, I’m afraid, the sort of literary celebrities with sufficient quantities of the 21st-century corruption of fame to hook a publisher. It was, we all agreed, a sad state of affairs, and one that meant that engrossing lives of great personal and professional substance were being overlooked – as, indeed, they are in almost every field of human endeavour.