Novelist Helen Yglesias’s death, a day before her 93rd birthday, recalls “a contented middle-aged couple sat up in bed, seen from the waist up in neatly pressed pyjamas with the piped edge of the lapels wonderfully reproduced in stone, faint smiles upon their modeled lips, their deep-set eyes gazing pleasantly upon the prospect of their buried bodies which became a natural extension of the stone figures”. This graveyard features in Sweetsir (1981), the best-known of her five novels, the first published at fifty-seven: in these, marriage oftens proves rockier than that stone’s depiction.

The seventh and youngest child of easy-going Polish immigrants who ran doomed Brooklyn stores, she read continually, “no trouble to anybody but myself”. Cellini’s memoirs “spoke of the 16th-century as naturally as if he were another one of my brothers”. Meanwhile, a brother so derided her attempt at a novel that she shredded it — he made amends with a trip to Europe and the Middle East.

This stirred her imagination, but after sundry jobs she chose marriage to Bernard Cole, in 1938, as “a way out of a dilemma” — despite his giving her a previous lover’s diary. Divorced in 1950, she married Jose Yglesias, whose Daily Worker movie-reviewing mutated into reaching a pharmaceutical company’s upper echelons, rewarding enough for his quitting to write novels. Meanwhile, his wife, beset by partial deafness (curiously blamed upon noisy debate during the broadcast of Kruschev’s United Nations appearance) still hungered to write. After a Spanish sojurn and return to New York in 1965, informed bluff brought diligent work at The Nation’s influential literary pages. Four years on, Christina Stead inspired her to quit and write.

A move to Maine brought the substantial How She Died (1972). Mary, dying from breast cancer, is married to faithless Matt, whose mistress Jean joins others at her hospital bedside, including those who supported her mother when imprisoned for spying. This vigorous, machine-washable prose also sustains Family Feeling (1976). Set in the Fifties, with a mother’s body returning to Penn station, her many children — contrasting writer Anne and businessman Barry — reflect on turbulent history. Come the funeral: “It’s Barry’s show, and she is aware of his narrowed eyes sweeping the congregation. Is he counting the house?” Starting (1978) discussed various people’s first work. Sweetsir (1981) was based on a true case. Sally inadvertently, fatally knifes husband number two. Praised by Fay Weldon — “what a pleasure!” — its sexual pace rivals Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr Goodbar. Across two blistering marriages, there are such asides as “rules that never existed in the motel governed their marriage bed”. She wonders whether the pill would turn her into a freak — “the male her father had always wanted”. And if her “husband wanted a fight, she’d give him a good fight. Hadn’t she always wanted to please him?” Robert Redford’s film never materialised.

After returning to New York, Saviours (1987) chronicled an ageing activist. An elegant monograph (1989) honoured Isabel Bishop who, surviving a jump into the Hudson (“my body just wouldn’t die. It began to swim”), painted Union Square’s denizens through “our overblown century”. After another decade, interrupted by divorce, Helen Yglesias’s last, unabashed novel The Girls (1999) found four eighty-plus sisters at loggerheads in retirement.

Her three children (two from her first marriage) are also writers.

Helen Yglesias, author, was born on March 29, 1915. She died on March 28 2008, aged 92