Emma Christina Tennant FRSL (20 October 1937 – 21 January 2017) was an English novelist and editor of Scottish extraction, known for a post-modern approach to her fiction, often imbued with fantasy or magic. Several of her novels give a feminist or dreamlike twist to classic stories, such as Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll and Mrs Hyde. She also published under the pseudonym Catherine Aydy.
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Early life
Tennant was of Scottish extraction, the daughter of Christopher Grey Tennant, 2nd Baron Glenconner, and Elizabeth, Lady Glenconner (née Powell). She remembered her father as a mix of rage and benevolence. She was the niece of Edward and Stephen Tennant, and the half-sister of Colin Tennant, later the third Baron Glenconner, from her father's first marriage.
Born in London, she spent the World War II years at the family's faux Gothic mansion The Glen in Peeblesshire. Her parents were regularly absent, while The Glen "was the strangest possible place. I knew no other world at all until I was nine." The family then resettled in London. Tennant was educated at St Paul's Girls' School, but left when she was 15. She spent some time at an Oxford finishing school, studying languages and the history of art, and a year in Paris at The Louvre. In the mid-1960s, her parents built a house in Corfu, known as Rovinia. She spent much time there throughout her life and later in 2001, published a book about the building of the house, entitled A House in Corfu.