Draft:Tessa Lorant Warburg

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Tessa Elizabeth Irene Lorant Warburg (25 February 1929 – 16 September 2024), known variously as Tessa Warburg, Tessa Lorant Warburg, “Teil” after her birth initials, and the pen name Emma Lorant, was the author of more than 30 books. Her range spans mystery, historical novels, her trademark sci-fi / speculative fiction / occult blend, nonfiction, art, and a respected body of advanced instructional publications on textiles, hand knitting, and machine knitting, some of which are still available today, almost half a century after their writing.

Warburg was also a World War II survivor, a mathematician, a computer programmer, a publisher, and a college lecturer. A polymath and citizen of the world, Warburg was born in Berlin, baptized (Lutheran) in Vienna, and during her life held Hungarian, US, and British citizenship. Living at various times in Germany, Austria, England, and the US, Warburg continued to write and publish across all her genres until her death at 95.

Warburg’s award-winning book, A Voice at Twilight., written in 1986, was a courageous and uplifting account of the final months of the life of her husband (author, lecturer and professor Jeremy Warburg). Written as a diary in which a dying man shares his uncensored thoughts on death, the process of dying, and medical care, it explores health issues still current today, including the hospice movement and the need for change in our approach to the terminally ill. This book won a prestigious Oddfellows Social Concern Award for Literature (now the Oddfellows “Making a Difference Award”), and Warburg was invited to the House of Commons for the award’s presentation in 1987.

At the other end of the spectrum of Warburg’s writing, her gripping speculative fiction / occult novel Cloner, published in 1993, was optioned for movie rights in 2023; at the time of this article, the movie Cloner is in post-production for planned release in late 2025.

Early life

Born in 1929 in East Berlin, as the oldest child of Hungarian father Ralph Renzo Lorant (then working for IBM Europe) and American mother Gisella Gehben (daughter of Ernst Gehben, who commissioned the famous Art Nouveau Villa Gehben in Altenbruch, Germany – designed by architect Achmet Steinmetz with windows by Louis Comfort Tiffany), Warburg’s father was prescient regarding Germany’s future and went to great lengths to have her registered as a Hungarian citizen at birth, which years later would help save her from the Nazis.

Warburg was raised in Vienna, as her parents moved there just three months after her birth, but everything changed in 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria. Since her father was of Jewish descent, and her mother an anti-Nazi activist, the family had to flee. During this period, her parents also divorced, and Warburg and her sister Dinny lived between Vienna and Geneva with their father before managing to join her mother and stepfather, Franz Bosch, as refugees in rural England, where her second sister, Katharina, was born. There Warburg resumed her interrupted education at several convent schools and won a scholarship to Oxted Grammar School in Surrey. As refugees, she and her sister “paid rent” to house the whole family by taking turns playing chess with a local baronet, Sir John Hopkins, a former MP and the elderly owner of a large nearby estate.

Her stepfather was interned on the Isle of Man, but when the war ended Warburg was able to secure US citizenship at age 19 through her father, who was then working for IBM in the US, and traveled from Southampton, England, to New York on Cunard’s first Queen Elizabeth ocean liner, escaping from World War II’s aftermath in Europe.

She returned to England to continue her studies as one of only two women in the Maths program at London University, now the University of Southampton. Her tutor, a keen geometer, introduced her to the mathematical aspects of knitting – topology, a branch of mathematics around geometric configurations that are unaltered by elastic deformations (such as stretching or twisting) – while her fellow students, more practical, taught her English knitting versus her previous Continental method.

During a summer hitchhiking around Salzburg with her fellow female maths student, Warburg met the man who would steal her heart – Jeremy Warburg. On two different paths, they agreed to meet again in Vienna, navigating through French/English/US and Russian-occupied parts of Austria. Americans at the border kindly loaned the girls a GI driver, and they made it to Vienna and successfully reunited.

After many separate travels and long letters, during which Warburg returned to the US as a computer programmer in New York City, they were reunited at the University of Wisconsin Department of Mathematics, where Warburg was then a graduate assistant and would win her Master’s degree in mathematics, and where her future husband had secured a professorship. They married on Christmas Eve, 1953.

The couple returned to London, where Warburg secured UK citizenship and taught Pure and Applied Mathematics at (sequentially) a London college and two schools on the London commuter belt, Northfield School (Watford), and a small school Heronsfield (Chorleywood), while having three children: first Madeleine, then identical twins Colin and Richard.

It was a very unusual time for a woman to be a college professor of mathematics, and the family eventually left the city for a dilapidated vicarage in Somerset, where Warburg designed and knitted patterns for jumpers, socks, and waistcoats for her growing children and tall husband.

Career

Her husband, already a published author himself (nonfiction treatises on the English language), was the first to encourage Warburg to start writing, and under the name Tessa Lorant Warburg, she wrote a series of unexpectedly trendy books about knitting.

Her first book, the Batsford Book of Hand and Machine Knitting (Batsford Books, 1980) was followed by the Batsford Book of Hand and Machine Knitted Laces (Batsford Books, 1982) and Yarns for Textile Crafts (Van Nostrand Reinhold,1984).

Batsford had eliminated a few chapters Warburg was keen on, and she secured permission to publish these as separate short books under her husband’s own imprint, The Thorn Press (she and her children managed the early distribution, making up and mailing packages from their kitchen table in the vicarage). The first ‘short’ book, Earning and Saving with a Knitting Machine, was picked up and reviewed by The Telegraph and became an overnight success, leading to multiple print runs to keep up with demand.

Warburg went on to a number of sold-out press runs in this series, patented two knitting aids, and was one of only a handful of knitters mentioned in Richard Rutt’s A History of Hand Knitting

After unearthing some wonderful old Victorian knitting patterns, she wrote The Heritage of Knitting Series, six books that shocked her by their runaway success. While writing the first, Warburg discovered the source of the last remaining steel knitting needles in the UK. Seeing the potential, she bought the lot and issued Tessa Lorant's Collection of Knitted Lace Edgings with a pair of fine steel needles attached. Knitters were ecstatic, and the book went into multiple reprints.

The second in the series, Knitted Quilts and Flounces, was even more successful. Knowing that on complex patterns, the eye tends to skip lines, Warburg invented and patented the Lorant Locator and included it with the first printing of Knitted Quilts and Flounces. Again, knitters flocked to buy it by mail order and at trade shows, and the book also ran into reprints.

For the third, Knitted Lace Collars, Warburg developed a tensioning guide for the lace collars she was now designing – a style later made famous by Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Her research into the beautiful Victorian patterns combined with her maths background to reveal the patterns used 3D shaping (versus 2D as modern knitters had assumed). The Victorian patterns had given no 3D hints, and Warburg’s unique 3D guide (though unpatented) won her further fame in the knitting world.

For Knitted Shawls & Wraps, Warburg invented the Silver Gauge, patented for her by her son Richard, then an intellectual patent lawyer in Boston. The Silver Gauge enables knitters to easily substitute yarns in patterns. Warburg was amused when Britain’s then top knitting yarn manufacturer (Patons & Baldwin) feared the gauge would enable customers to buy elsewhere and tried to ban women’s magazines from offering it. They were right – knitting shows were mobbed with fans pursuing both the book and the gauge.

Warburg was fascinated to learn that Irish Crochet had helped many poor Irish families during the potato famine, and next wrote The Secrets of Successful Irish Crochet Lace, which caught the attention of famed bookseller Christina Foyle, who asked Warburg to mount an exhibition at Foyles, the Guinness World Record-holder for the world’s largest bookshop.

The Heritage of Knitting Series brought Warburg to the public eye – reviewed by The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Mail, it expanded her books’ fame from knitting magazines to national press, and she was asked to write a monthly column for Worldwide Machine Knitting.

Another lavishly illustrated book, Victorian Country Knitting, was lost to the public. Webb and Bower, publishers of The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady (now re-popularised by Downton Abbey fame) were thrilled to take up this entertaining and instructive account of knitting in the Victorian era, but unfortunately the firm collapsed before publishing.

After her husband died of cancer Tessa wrote, at his request, her first non-knitting book. A Voice at Twilight shares the inside story, not always solemn, of living – and dying – with cancer. The book won the Oddfellows Social Concern Award for Literature for its portrayal of the need for changes in the way physicians treat end-of-life care.

A Voice at Twilight started Warburg thinking of pure fiction. She wrote three books at the intersection of mystery / science fiction / speculative fiction for Headline Publishing. Her daughter Madeleine, who went on to a career in television, aided with characters and storylines exploring new developments in genetics in eerie, compelling tales.

Next, The Dohlen Inheritance trilogy, a family saga spanning the 20^th century was enthusiastically taken up by highly regarded London literary agent Giles Gordon. He considered it an important work, but as sagas were not ‘in’ at the time, the three books were not published until Warburg was in her early eighties (PaperBooks, 2009, 2010, 2011).

Awards

o  Oddfellows Social Concern Award for Literature (now the Oddfellows Making a Difference Award)

o  Holder of two patents for knitting aids:

·      US Patent 4,697,346 – The Silver Gauge: A device for gauging the category to which a length of yarn belongs. The device comprises a flat sheet having a plurality of elongated transparent regions. Each region corresponds in width and contour to a length of yarn from a specific category of yarn, when the length is pulled to lie in a straight line.

·      UK Patent – The Lorant Locator: A device for line isolation in intricate knitting patterns involving long pattern lines, where the eye tends to jump to another line.

·      The Golden Gauge (not patented).

Publications

Trilogies

This series of semi-autobiographical novels – a multigenerational family saga – takes readers inside escapes from Nazi Germany and occupied Austria, world travels, and the complexities of sister and family relations

The Dohlen Inheritance, Tessa Lorant Warburg (The Thorn Press, 2009, 2009, 2010, Hardback ISBN 978 0 906374 03 0; Softback ISBN 978 0 906374 06 1)

Hobgoblin Gold, Tessa Lorant Warburg (The Thorn Press, 2010, 2011, ISBN 978 0 906374 08 5)

Ladybird Fly, Tessa Lorant Warburg (The Thorn Press, 2011, ISBN 978 0 906374 09 2)

Speculative fiction / sci-fi and occult

Cradle of Secrets, writing as Emma Lorant (Headline Publishing, 1993, ISBN 0 7472 0845 X); later republished as Cloner (details below)

Lullaby of Fear, writing as Emma Lorant (Headline Publishing, 1994, Hardback, ISBN 0 7472 0963 4; Softback, ISBN 0 7472 4564 9)

Baby Roulette, writing as Emma Lorant (Headline Publishing, 1995)

Spellbinder, Tessa Lorant Warburg (The Thorn Press, 2012, 2013, 2 editions, ISBN 978 0 906374 31 3), an unsuspecting American man on vacation in Sussex with his Labrador stumble into a murder mystery and find uncanny parallels to their past

Cloner (previously published as Cradle of Secrets), writing as Emma Lorant (e-book, 1993, ISBN 978 0 906374 32 0, and hardback, The Thorn Press, 2013), a chilling novel exploring biochemical experimentation and cloning, set in the deceptive serenity of sun-dappled Glastonbury; in 2024 optioned and in 2025 produced as a film by independent studio TF Film Productions

Mysteries

Thou Shalt Not Kill, Tessa Lorant Warburg (The Thorn Press, 2012, 2013, ISBN 978 0 906374 28 3), a historical suspense novel where a feisty widow meets a dashing bachelor, and they investigate a murder from the past on the Channel Island of Guernsey

The Girl from the Land of Smiles, Tessa Lorant Warburg (The Thorn Press, 2012, 2013, 2014, 3 editions, ISBN 9780906374306), a rural Thai girl relocated to the city brings her English boyfriend home to meet her conservative parents; when a beautiful local girl is found dead the next day, he is accused of murder

Knitting and textiles

The Batsford Book of Hand and Machine Knitting, Tessa Lorant (Batsford Books, 1980, ISBN 13 9780713433166, ISBN 0 7134 3316 7; distributed internationally by Chrysalis Books; paperback 1982, ISBN 0 7134 0946 0, reprinted 1984)

The Batsford Book of Hand and Machine Knitted Laces, Tessa Lorant (Batsford Books, 1982, ISBN 0 7134 3920 3) distributed internationally by David & Charles Publishing)

Yarns for Textile Crafts - Tessa Lorant (Van Nostrand Rheinhold, 1984, ISBN 0 442 25978 6; ISBN 0 671 60999 8)

Heritage of Knitting Series, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, multiple reprints 1981-1985; reprinted again 2013-2014)

·      Tessa Lorant's Collection of Knitted Lace Edgings, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, ISBN 0 906374 14 6) 1981, (ISBN 0 906374 15 4) 1982, (ISBN 0 906374 18 9) 1986, Facsimile (ISBN 978 0 906374 50 4) 2014; 5 printings)

·      Knitted Shawls & Wraps, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, (ISBN 0 906374 16 2) 1984, Facsimile (ISBN 978 0 906374 52 8) 2014; 2 printings)

·      Knitted Quilts and Flounces: White Knitting from the Victorian Era, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1982, 1983, 1984, ISBN 0 906374 17 0; Facsimile 2012, 2013, 2014, ISBN 978 0 906374 29 0)

·      Knitted Lace Collars, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1983, Hardback SBN 0 906374 19 7; Facsimile 2014, ISBN 978 0 906374 51 1)

·      Knitted Lace Doilies, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1986, 2014, ISBN 0 906374 25 1 and ISBN 978 0 906374 54 2)

·      The Secrets of Successful Irish Crochet Lace, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1985, 2014, ISBN 0 906374 24 3 and ISBN 978 0 906374 53 5)

Victorian Country Knitting, Tessa Lorant (picked up by Webb and Bower but unpublished before their closing)

Earning and Saving with a Knitting Machine, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1980, ISBN 0 906374 10 3)

Choosing and Buying a Knitting Machine, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1980, ISBN 0 906374 13 8)

Yarns for the Knitter, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1980, ISBN 0 906374 12 X)

The Good Yarn Guide, Tessa Lorant (The Thorn Press, 1985, ISBN 0 906374 22 7)

Shetland Shawls, Tessa Lorant

Other Nonfiction

Forget-Me-Not, pending posthumous publication, a flower book for children

Baldly Speaking, pending posthumous publication, a memoir

Somerset Scenes (The Thorn Press), Jeremy Warburg and Tessa Warburg 1985 (ISBN 978 0 906374 46 7), a collection of Warburg’s paintings

Snack Yourself Slim, Emma Lorant, co-written with her son Richard Warburg (The Thorn Press, (ISBN 978 0 906374 05 4) 2008, reprinted 2013).

A Voice at Twilight, Tessa Lorant Warburg (ISBN 0 7206 0706 X) (Peter Owen Publishers, 1988), Warburg’s first full-length nonfiction book, an account of the final months of the life of her brilliant writer-professor husband Jeremy Warburg, it won a prestigious Oddfellows Literary Award

The Grockles’ Guide, Jeremy Warburg and Tessa Lorant (ISBN 0 906374 23 5) The Thorn Press 1985.: An illustrated miscellany of words and phrases of interest and use to "voreigners" in Somerset.

Unpublished

Their Plumage – Saffron-Dyed

Thai Proverbs

The Old World

Movies

Cloner, a republishing of one of Warburg’s first fiction books (Cradle of Secrets, which was later republished as Cloner), a science fiction / occult novel (with which her daughter Madeleine assisted, providing much of the plot and characterization) was optioned and produced as a movie by TF Film Productions Ltd