Jennifer Fiennes had two careers, novelist and inspirational mother to an extremely gifted family. But behind her capacity for inspiring her children lay her own troubled past. Mick Brown examines a very particular life.

When Jini Fiennes died in 1993, at the age of 55, in a Salisbury hospice, the conventional pieties were kept at some remove. Fiennes had been born and raised a Catholic, but in conformity with Buddhist teachings her body lay for 12 hours on her deathbed, on a linen cloth stitched with a map of Ireland, her prayer beads twisted in her hands while candles were lit and her family and friends sang religious chants at her bedside. Suspicious of 'professionals in black coats,' her husband, Mark, her six children and her foster son made the funeral arrangements themselves. A coffin was fashioned and painted electric blue -- the colour of 'Silencia,' the symbol of strength in Tristram and the Power of Lights, a book which Fiennes had written for, and read to, her children. The colour of silence, permanence, enlightenment.

The coffin would not fit into the family car; it was transported in a friend's VW bus to the cemetery at nearby Wardor. Fiennes's four sons, Ralph, Magnus, Jacob and Joseph, carried it up the slippery path, eased it over the webbing straps, lowered it into the grave and covered it with earth, while an Irish piper played a final lament.

Three years before her death, Jini Fiennes had embarked on a pilgrimage to the holy sites of France and Spain. The cancer from which she had been suffering for three years was in remission. Yet the fear and discomfort in which she traveled was an inspiration rather than an encumbrance. "Poor cancer, the word is dark and terrible," she was to write in On Pilgrimage, her account of her journey. "A star may be sharp and full of pain, but it may also be a guide, a useful companion on a dark night." Her journey was arduous, and led her back to her self. "Perhaps the interior way is the one that counts most in the end,' she wrote. 'No journey can be more dark and difficult, unexpected and hazardous than that. There is always somewhere this deep, searching sense that you are, in some respects, unlike anyone else and, in this, there is a very particular purpose."

The obituaries which followed Jini's death made mention of her talents as a writer and painter, but the 'very particular purpose' they dwelt on was more unusual than that. Jini, all suggested, had a very particular capacity to give, and to inspire, love.

As well as On Pilgrimage, Jini Fiennes published five novels, but she was a writer whose talents were never really recognized when she was alive. If her name was known at all, it is as the mother of more famous lights.

Her eldest son, Ralph, is Britain's hottest acting property, acclaimed for his performances as Hamlet and Ivanov, and his roles in Schindler's List and The English Patient, which opens this week. Joseph is also an actor, acclaimed for his portrayal of Christ in Dennis Potter's play, Son of Man. Magnus is a composer; daughter Martha is a film director, Sophie is a theatrical designer. Only Jacob has opted out of the apparent obligation to turn the family into a mini dynasty of the performing arts. He is a gamekeeper.

If she were alive today, Jini would no doubt welcome the recognition of her talented family as her greatest creation. "We were her special project,' says her daughter Martha, "and she gave it 100 percent." But there was more to this project than immediately meets the eye.

This week sees the first publication of Fiennes sixth and final novel. Written three years before her death, and published under her maiden name of Jennifer Lash, Blood Ties is a dense, dark and brooding novel about family life, the damage that neglect and indifference may inflict on children, and the power of love as a force of healing and redemption.

Reading it, knowing absolutely nothing of Jini Fiennes, Blood Ties is a powerful and affecting book. But what makes the book more compelling still is how its story stands as a metaphor for her own extraordinary life, and her own very particular purpose. It is a story of how good may come from bad.

Growing up, it was hard for Jini Lash to avoid God, in theory if not practice. Her grandfather ran a Seaman's Mission in the East End of London. One uncle, Bill, was the Bishop of Bombay. Another, Patrick, is a Catholic monk. Of her two brothers, one was a Catholic priest who left the priesthood, married a former nun and became a professor of theology; the second became an archimandrite in the Greek Orthodox Church. Her younger sister was to become a card carrying member of the Communist Party.

She was born in Sussex in 1938, but at an early age moved to India. Her father, Henry, was an Army officer who served with an Indian hill regiment, and in Burma under General Slim. Her mother, Joan, from Irish Catholic stock, was an officer's wife -- 'a great slash of red lipstick and a whiff of Guerlain as she leaned over to say "goodnight darling" on her way to cocktails at Ooti,' as Jini's daughter Sophie recalls. Jini's closest relationship was with her nanny, who inculcated her with a strong sense of responsibility.

In 1947, the family returned to England, arriving in Liverpool on a troopship. While everyone rushed to land side to see their families, her nanny instructed her young charge that it was their duty to 'right the ship.' They docked in Liverpool with the young girl staring fixedly out to sea. "She thought England was going to be like a Beatrix Potter watercolour, like something from a children's book," says Sophie, "but it wasn't like that at all. It was a nightmare."

The family settled in the village of Churt in Surrey, in a house called Bridge End. Melancholic evergreens, arterial roads, gravel drives, stifling mock- tudor respectability. 'The Brigadier,' as he was known to all and sundry, took early retirement. They became Henry and Joan, relics of the Raj.

Joan flourished -- a force in the Women's Institute, casting herself, with no delusions of modesty, as Good Queen Bess in the local amateur dramatics.

Shorn of purpose, the Brigadier resigned himself to the British Legion, the local scout troop, the golf club fruit machine. A droopy mustache, wet lips, an ever present packet of Wills Woodbines; tapping the barometer; string backed driving gloves. He was a man who would weep copiously at the slightest excuse. His granddaughter Sophie recalls him in later years 'a very sad figure, watching Cumberwick Green on television, dabbing his eyes.'

The marriage, says Mark Fiennes, was "like a Harold Pinter play; a sort of mad non-communication. The mother was incapable of love. Very self-centered. It was me, me, me."

Emotionally estranged from his wife, the father turned his attentions on his daughter in a way that, according to one family member, was "extremely possessive and not altogether healthy."

Jini was a spirited, independent, imaginative child. But between her father's oppressive and lachrymose sense of dislocation, her mother's attention-seeking, and the brittle intellectual gymnastics of her two elder brothers, she began to drown. "They didn't understand her, didn't appreciate her,"says Mark. "She was very damaged by the home background; that is irrefutable."

Quite how damaged is apparent in a play, My Mother Said, drawing explicitly on her childhood, which she wrote five years before her death, but which was never completed. In it, the pubescent Pamela struggles to express herself in a household characterized by verbal chastisement, desperate silences and suffocating control.

"High spirits are loose, random," says the father. "They must be toned down, channeled. They must not lead. They must follow, and they must follow at an appropriate pace." Shortly after this peroration he follows his daughter into her bedroom. 'She is lying on her back staring at the ceiling,' the stage directions read. "He puts his jacket carefully over the chair. He unbuttons and then carefully rolls up his sleeves. "We'll soon have you warm. We'll soon have you comfortable." He is obviously feeling her breasts and down her body. He is kneeling by the bed with both hands under the covers. She is rigid as if in a trance.'

It was a scene repeated many times in Jini's own childhood. Joan Lash was aware of her husband's assaults on her daughter but it was never mentioned, never condemned. She had a phrase: 'You paddle your own canoe...'

It is hardly surprising then, that Jini was regarded as 'difficult,' volatile, histrionic, prone to fits and tantrums. Her mother nicknamed her 'Sarah Bernhardt.'

According to Mark Fiennes, only two people in her adolescence recognized her potential. One was her uncle Patrick who, as a Benedictine monk, took the name Father Sebastian. "He actually listened to Jini," says Mark, "and he told the parents, "My God, this girl's a genius -- listen everybody, you've been ignoring her, listen." But of course, they couldn't listen."

The other was Mother (now Sister) Pru Wilson, the headmistress at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Turnbridge Wells, where Jini was sent at the age of 12.

Pru Wilson remembers her as highly original, anarchic -- a mixture of high spirits and awkward questions. "She had extraordinary wisdom for a young girl, and extraordinary rightness of judgment when she was in her sane moods. She could give a run-down on every member of the class, every nun and member of staff, with perception and clarity which showed the future novelist."

Bright, precocious and imaginative she may have been; but academically gifted she was not.

She fared poorly in O-levels. Recognizing her potential, Pru Wilson wanted her to stay on at school. But the parents refused. "It was supposed to be financial, but the fees were very low and I think that if she had been a boy, the money would have been found."

In any event, the family situation had become intolerable. There was an argument which culminated in her shutting herself in her room and screaming whenever her parents came near. The doctor was called, and a priest. Shortly afterwards, she left home for good. She was 16.

In later years, whenever Jini became hysterical or difficult, her husband Mark would tease her about being 'damaged goods from Bridge End.' It became a synonym among the family for the seat of hell, from which Jini had escaped.

She moved, alone, to London. She lived in bed-sits, did a series of low-paid clerical jobs and worked briefly as an under-matron at a boy's prep school. The seeds of emotional insecurity sowed in childhood flowered. She suffered intense mood swings and, on one occasion, took an overdose of sleeping pills. She was found unconscious on Brompton Road and hospitalized. She was seen by a succession of psychiatrists and diagnosed as 'a malignant hysteric.'

She moved to Suffolk, to live with an old family friend, Iris Birtwistle. Birtwistle was to prove a formative influence. She had been acquainted with Virginia Woolf and had an extensive library. Lash had only rudimentary formal education -- she was an atrocious speller -- but she was galvanized by literature and the world of ideas. At the age of 21, with Birtwistle's encouragement, she wrote her first novel.

The Burial is an extraordinary book about alienation and breakdown, shaded in equal parts by religiosity and Freud. In a neurasthenic interior monologue that recalls Knut Hamsun's Hunger, it charts the life of its heroine, Dilla, from the ages of eight to 21, through childhood misery and insecurity to a fraught marriage and a profoundly disturbed motherhood. Reproval stalks every page.

"You know, Dilla," a nun remarks at one point, "you have great potentiality and ability, and yet for some reason you seem concerned at present with one thing only, and that is to prove to yourself that you are useless."

Lash's mother delivered her verdict by telephone. "Jennifer,' she reproached her daughter, 'anyone would think you'd had an unhappy childhood."

The Burial was written in throes of mental turmoil. On one occasion, Lash was admitted to mental hospital, but managed to effect a discharge after 24 hours. Eventually she was introduced to a Jungian analyst. 'He told her, "There's absolutely nothing wrong with you,"' says Mark Fiennes. "Maybe a little bit of tidying up later, but otherwise. . ." And he gave he terrific confidence.'

The novelist Dodie Smith, author of The Hundred and One Dalmatians, met lash in Suffolk, shortly after the publication of The Burial, and noted in her diary that she was 'almost too interesting to be true.' She described Lash riding around on a motor-scooter, alternately dressed in beatnik garb and twin-set and pearls. "She could easily turn out to be the most brilliant person I've ever written about.  At lunch, Lash regaled Smith with stories of her loathing for her parents, saying that she seldom heard a telephone ring without hoping it would bring news of her parents' sudden death.

"We talked almost as much as she did," Smith wrote, "about literature, philosophy, religion, people -- and she was never less informed than we were, and sometimes very much better informed. Why, then, am I faintly suspicious? Only because she seems too clever, and is satirically critical of people."

It was in Suffolk that Lash met the man who would become her husband. Mark Fiennes was a tenant farmer -- a 'rough diamond,' Jini was told.

He was invited by Iris Birtwistle to meet the highly strung young author.

There are, Fiennes now says, very few moments in life when one is absolutely certain about anything. His first sight of Jennifer Lash was one of them. 'She was sitting on a sofa in the library, on a cold November evening, her feet curled up under her as she always sat, and I thought, that's it. I didn't need to look or think any more about it. It was completely extraordinary.'

At the time, Lash was working on her second novel, The Climate of Belief, a book about a young monk struggling to reconcile a fierce intellectualism with devotion, based largely on the conversations she had overheard at Bridge End between Uncle Sebastian and her two brothers.

Fiennes invited her to tea at his farm. "She turned up on her moped," he says. "She came in and almost the first thing she said was, "You don't want to be frightened of this writing bit. All I want to do is have six children."  They married 18 months later, and within 8 years, her six children had been born.

The received wisdom about families is that the damaged child becomes the damaged parent, who in turn visits their unhappiness on their own children. But it seems that Jini Fiennes broke this cycle -- that the damage which she had suffered as a child became the inspiration to shape a family life which embodied all the love and support which had been missing from her own.

The Climate of Belief was published shortly before the birth of her first son, Ralph. She would not write another book for 15 years. "The family,' says Mark Fiennes, 'became everything."

"I think she got an enormous confidence in herself through being the mistress of this empire," her daughter, Sophie, says. "It was a world she created, and it made her fearless."

Lash seemed hardly able to contain her enthusiasm to enlarge it. At the age of 25, after the birth of Ralph and her first daughter, Martha, she chanced on an advertisement on the front page of The Times, place by a local authority, seeking foster-homes for children.

'It read "Michael, aged 11, urgently seeks a home where he is allowed to read a book,"' Mark Fiennes remembers. "Of course, that triggered it instantly! He must have a chance to read! Of course he must have a home! It turned out that the only thing he read was the Dandy and the Beano. But he was a child, is a man, of outstanding intelligence."

Michael Emery's mother had abandoned him to the care of an aunt when he was three. His aunt, in turn, had abandoned him to the care of local authorities, and he spent eight years between a variety of chalderns and foster homes. Emery, who is now an archaeologist, was by his own admission 'a damaged, difficult child, who had never known parental love.'

"It always amazes me," says Ralph Fiennes, "how my mother, who had not known any family affection or intimacy at all, could be quite so successful as a mother herself. It was as if she had this extraordinary, vital imagination that enabled her to perceive and create the possibilities for some other world for herself."

Ralph remembers the first seven years of his life as idyllic. The family lived on the farm where Mark was the tenant. Children arrived in quick and bewildering succession. "We were very happy, extraordinarily happy, before all the financial anxieties overshadowed us."

By the end of the Sixties, the farm had become untenable. The family moved to Dorset and Mark took up commercial photography. It was the beginning of what Sophie describes a 'a gradual process of downscaling,' with the family living off what little Mark made from photography and the slim proceeds of buying houses cheaply, renovating them, selling them and repeating the process. From Dorset, to Ireland, to Wiltshire, to London - the family lived in 15 different houses in as many years.

Ralph Fiennes recalls his family life as everything 'en masse' -- a melange of children, friends, animals, endless queues for the bath and wondering where the next meal was coming from.

What is most striking about the book is her capacity to see past the ritual and dogma of religion, the architecture of the holy places, to see the most simple and profound expressions of faith.

In the convent in Nevers, where Bernadette of Lourdes spent her last days, Fiennes recoils from the travesty of Bernadette's fate as a saint; her body exhumed, bit hacked off, the corpse washed, brushed and laid out for public inspection. And then discovers a truth in a display of Bernadette's belongings: '...her worn, faded work apron and slippers, and then a pair of long, black woolen stockings and in one of them, very near to the glass, this huge darn. A perfect circle of calmly woven thread, no bobble or tug, no tension, no rough not. Only someone very special, stable and peaceful could make that kind of darn. To me it was a work of art. To do the smallest thing so supremely well, it had to be done with Love.'

In her first novel, The Burial, written 30 years earlier, she had written, 'I'm sure that love should be a constant state, nothing sudden.'

In On Pilgrimage she wrote, "In a loose, wide way, I have never doubted Love to be the central, unifying force that in some mysterious ways connects all nature, man and beast, insect and stone, to the greater Cosmic good of God. Atman. Nirvana. Some source of liberation. A sum of transposed, live reality, that is intelligent beyond intelligence, and must remain a mystery. I had given up looking for exact words long ago."

Perhaps she had found them.

With On Pilgrimage completed, Lash began work on what was to be her last novel, Blood Ties. It is a book that can be read as an index of the abiding themes of her own life.

Violet and Cedric are locked in a stale and loveless marriage -- her own parents. In a moment of joyless union they conceived a son, but they are incapable of showing him love. He goes to the bad, and fathers an illegitimate child by a lost soul named Dolly, herself a refugee from an unhappy upbringing in a Surrey village -- the Churt of Fiennes's own childhood. Damaged goods from Bridge End. The young child Spencer is neglected, pushed from pillar to post -- shades here of Michael Emery's early life. And so it goes. In its elaborate and painstaking progress, Blood Ties charts all the dreads and demons of family indifference and discord. Yet its final embracing theme is of acceptance and redemption. It is as if Fiennes is espousing some essential truth of her own life: that the cycle of damage can be broken by love.

"It was the book she enjoyed writing most," says Mark, "but it was a very painful experience. I would hear her upstairs; screams of agony over her word-processor; Leonard Cohen being played over and over again, fortissimo."

Blood Ties is a harrowing, demanding book, but ultimately a profoundly inspiring one. When her publisher declined to publish it, says Mark Fiennes, "she was devastated."

Discouraged from contemplating another novel, she now planned a new book and another journey, among the women of Levant. She had 'no passionate feminine theme,' she wrote in a scribbled explanation of its theme, 'simply the certainty that the Source from which Love and Caring proceed is from a dynamic we all have in common, a fact we need continually to affirm and recognize.' But the book was never written.

She had begun to feel unhappy living in England, to feel the world closing in on her. She went to Andalucia, to stay with friends, but the climate exacerbated her growing health problems. She returned to the family home in south London to discover that the cancer had now returned with a vengeance, moving from her breasts to her lungs. She knew that she was dying. A friend suggested the loan of a cottage in Suffolk where she could be alone.

"There was a sharpening of her awareness of mortality," says Ralph, "and therefore of how her moments of being alive needed to be embraced and fulfilled in a way that perhaps none of us really quite understood."

Sophie describes her mother's retreat to the isolation of Suffolk as an act of faith. "She believed passionately in faith, instinctively in it, and I think she wanted to find a way to experience it. It was very solitary, but I think it was to do with confronting her situation, confronting belief, and confronting what was going to happen."

The Suffolk cottage was tiny. There was a small, glass-roofed conservatory where she painted; a kitchen where she cooked and ate; a bedroom cluttered with books. By her bedside was a copy of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and a slim volume by the Indian mystic, Mother Meera.

Shortly before her death, she was visited by her old headmistress, Sister Wilson, and her oldest schoolfriend, Gaie Vickers. It was, Pru Wilson remembers, a cold, grey day. They had a lunch of bread, cheese and wine, which Sister Wilson called a 'Eucharist.' Gaie had brought healing oils, and in the afternoon she lay down her dying friend and massaged her feet, while Sister Wilson sat in the corner and prayed.

"Eventually, I opened my eyes," she remembers, "and the room was full of sunshine. Gaie was at Jini's feet, Jini absolutely still, and there was the extraordinary sense of the presence of God. Then Jini slept, immensely at ease."

When her illness became too much, Mark collected her from Suffolk. She was admitted to hospital at Odstock, Wiltshire, then to the hospice. In her room she had a crucifix, an image of Padmasambhava, the patron saint of Tibetan Buddhism, and a drawing of herself done by Michael Emery's daughter.

"She could hardly speak," says Ralph. "Two words and she had to take a breath. But there was an amazing sense of acceptance about it. I could imagine her seeing all these faces of concern and encouragement crowding around, and I could see her acknowledging us and smiling, and I can also see that thing of just distancing us as well."

"I remember Magnus saying to her, "Jini are you excited? Are you curious? It's exciting, wow, you're going to die...,"' says Sophie. 'Because that was the way she'd always encouraged us to see death. And she said, "Yes, I am excited, I am curious, but I am a little nervous though."'

On the night she died, Sophie was in the room, in a cot beside her mother. "She didn't want them to give her drugs, because she hated the fogging of her mind. She wanted to die consciously. She hated avoidance of issues. She had always made us confront issues if they were painful, not run away. But her breathing was so difficult that they gave her a huge injection of diamorphine."

"I lay there in this pitch-dark room, hearing her breathing get shallower and shallower. I was actually willing her to go -- yes it's all right. And then she just started to lose her cool. She said, "I can't stand this f***ing breathing anymore; it's going to drive me mad." And the last thing she said, which I thought was really ironic, was "I just don't want to get hysterical."

In "My Mother Said," the play she wrote five years before her death, Jini Fiennes clearly set out to lay to rest all the ghosts of her childhood: the oppressive atmosphere of Bridge End, the abusive advances of her father, the indifference of her mother -- 'you paddle your own canoe.'

Like Jini herself, the young girl, Pamela, is drowning in a sea of blame, recrimination and spite, until the arrival in the household of a free-spirited cousin, Billy. They walk together, and Pamela talks of her desire to escape the nightmare of her family life, to be 'certain of me. Certain that there is something else. Something big, wild and wonderful.'

"You have to trust in yourself," Billy replies. "We're birds really; we're meant for flight. We've got to reach for the moon."

But what, Pamela asks, "if you have all your feathers pulled out, one by one, just as they grow? What then?"

"Then," says Billy, "you just have to trust in yourself even more, and ... they grow again."