Her death Wednesday was confirmed by Granta, her British publisher.
Athill’s renown came with “Somewhere Towards the End," the sixth — though by no means the last — volume of her autobiography. Published in 2008, the year she turned 91, it is a meditation on the inevitable pains, and unexpected pleasures, of aging.
Jenny Diski, reviewing the volume, wrote in The Sunday Times of London: “Such a book is in itself a rare enough thing, but a book about old age written by a woman with a cold eye for reality and no time for sentimental lies is as rare as — well, as rare as a thoughtful discussion about a woman’s sexuality after the age of 60.”
“Somewhere Towards the End” won a Costa Book Award (formerly the Whitbread Book Award) in Britain, and a National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States.
Athill’s authorial success was all the more striking in that she had never intended to be a writer. Long before she put pen to paper, she was known as “the doyenne of English book editors,” as The New York Times Book Review described her in 2001.
A founding director of the London publishing house André Deutsch, Athill presided over a stable of authors that included Jean Rhys, V.S. Naipaul, Mordecai Richler and John Updike. She began writing only in her 40s, first short stories and then — her true métier — autobiography.
Over the next half-century, she produced eight or nine volumes of memoir (it depends on how one counts), the last of which, “A Florence Diary,” appeared in 2016.
From her first volume, “Instead of a Letter” (1962), to her last, Athill was praised by critics for her luminous prose, gimlet social acuity and ability to convey a profound sense of place.
Above all, she was praised for her candor. Athill was noted in particular for her cleareyed, unflinching honesty about her sexual appetites — long deemed a taboo thing for women to have, much less write about — and the exquisite pleasure, and exquisite pain, that they had engendered.
The daughter of Lawrence Athill, an army officer, and the former Alice Carr, Diana Athill was born in London on Dec. 21, 1917, according to Pru Rowlandson, her publicist at Granta. But she grew up in the county of Norfolk, in the east of England.
As good as her word, Athill never married. She leaves no immediate survivors.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.