Pat Kavanagh dies of brain tumour

Pat Kavanagh, the glamorous doyenne of literary agents and wife of the novelist Julian Barnes, died from a brain tumour yesterday aged 68. Tributes to her skill as an agent and her no-nonsense approach to the business of working with authors, securing handsome advances and looking after their interests, have been many and fulsome.

Her formidable list of authors included Barnes, Joanna Trollope, Robert Harris, Sir John Mortimer, Ruth Rendell and the estates of Dirk Bogarde and Laurie Lee. Margaret Drabble, one of Kavanagh's stable of bestselling authors, said that she stood out not only for her beauty but also because she was unerringly discreet, genuine and frank in an industry rife with gossip and flattery. Said Drabble: "She was vitality itself and she knew everything about everybody but she was also famous for never gossiping about anything at all."

Marriage to Barnes, the author of Flaubert's Parrot, exposed her to scrutiny. She had an affair with Jeanette Winterson, the author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but the marriage survived: so much so that when Barnes's old friend Martin Amis left Kavanagh to sign with the rival literary agent Andrew 'The Jackal' Wylie in 1995, Barnes severed his friendship with Amis.

Away from the negotiating table, Kavanagh was a fiercely private woman, but nevertheless found herself thrust into the media spotlight again recently when she was one of the agents who defected en masse from PFD (Peters, Fraser and Dunlop) to form United Agents.

Kavanagh was not the prime mover of the breakaway, which marked the end of tension between London's oldest literary and talent agency and CSS Stellar, the US sports marketing company that bought the business in 2001. Her decision to join the exodus, taking all her clients with her, was seen as a tipping point. In all, more than 30 agents and 75 staff left PFD.

As reported here, PFD and its withered client list was later sold at a knockdown price to a consortium headed by Andrew Neil, the former Editor of the Sunday Times. Kavanagh found the whole process traumatic but said this year: "We've walked on coals and now we're out the other side." ·