It’s the birthday of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927-2013), who won the prestigious Booker Prize for her 1975 novel Heat and Dust but who is better known for her Academy Award-winning screenplays of two E.M. Forster novels, A Room with a View (1986) and Howards End (1992), and for the other 20 films she worked on in conjunction with Merchant Ivory.

Jhabvala was born in Cologne, Germany, but her family was Jewish and escaped to London in 1939. Her father killed himself in 1948 after learning that all other family members had died in the concentration camps. Jhabvala graduated from Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1951 and married the Indian architect Cyrus Jhabvala. Together they moved to Delhi, where Jhabvala raised their three daughters and wrote novels. Her first novels, To Whom She Will (1955; American title, Amrita) and The Nature of Passions (1956), established her as a sort of Jane Austen of Indian society. (So if you’ve run out of Austens, start in on Jhabvalas.)

More novels followed—Esmond in India (1958), The Householder (1960), Get Ready for Battle (1962)—and Jhabvala started publishing stories in The New Yorker and writing screenplays for Merchant Ivory, beginning with their 1963 film adaptation for The Householder. NB: Ismail Merchant was Indian, James Ivory was American, and Jhabvala became the third vital member of the team. Other films they collaborated on include Shakespeare Wallah (1965), The Europeans (1979), The Remains of the Day (1993), and The Golden Bowl (2000); the final film the three made before Merchant’s death was Le Divorce (2003). Their films often starred the cream of the crop of British actors: Maggie Smith, Emma Thompson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Helena Bonham Carter, Anthony Hopkins.

(Look: if you want to take the rest of the day off and stream Remains of the Day or reread A Room with a View or get your hands on a Jhabvala novel you’ve never read before, you have my blessing. Same goes if you want to watch The Edge (1997), which has nothing to do with Jhabvala or Merchant Ivory but stars Anthony Hopkins as a brilliant rich guy and Alec Baldwin as a royal jerk and a blood-thirsty man-hunting bear. I’ll make the popcorn.)

Jhabvala moved to New York City in 1975 and eventually became a U.S. citizen. Upon his retirement, Jhabvala’s husband joined her in New York. Jhabvala’s final novel was My Nine Lives (2004), which explores nine alternative lives Jhabvala might have lived in America, India, and England; her last story collection, A Lovesong for India, came out in 2012. Jhabvala died in Manhattan at 85.

Have a refreshingly cool spring Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.