PASSINGS

Marghanita Laski, 72, Novelist and Critic

Marghanita Laski, 72, a novelist and critic, who published her first novel, “Love on the Supertax,” in 1944. Among her other novels were “Little Boy Lost,” which was turned into a 1953 film starring Bing Crosby as the father trying to find his son who disappeared in World War II, and “The Victorian Chaise Longue.” Her nonfiction works include books on Jane Austen, George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling and two studies of religious and aesthetic experience, “Ecstasy” and “Everyday Ecstasy.” In Dublin, Ireland, on Saturday after what was reported only as a short illness.