Anna Murdoch Mann dePeyster, steely wife of media mogul Rupert and protective matriarch – obituary

In 1985 her first novel, In Her Own Image, was published. An Australian pastoral romance, it was set in the early 1960s on a property not unlike the Murdoch family’s 25,000-acre sheep station near Canberra. While noting the novel’s unrelieved earnestness, The New York Times conceded that “among the many forms of love she portrays, the most compelling proves to be her own for the Australian outback, whose savage beauty she celebrates.”

Two more novels followed. Family Business (1988), written after Anna’s appointment to the board of News Corporation, told the tale of Yarrow Maclean, a female newspaper proprietor who builds a Murdochian empire. Coming to Terms (1991), a quirky story of family reconciliation set in rural upstate New York, was considered her least successful novel.

In 1991, the Murdochs moved again, to Los Angeles, after Rupert acquired Twentieth Century Fox. Anna, by then 47, remained a cool Hitchcockian blonde. Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times, wrote of her “slim crystalline beauty… She was talkative, vivacious and open… she entertained us with poise.”