Kind Scot who helped frugal Salinger's wife

The series of gifts were mailed to Claire Douglas, a young student who became the late author's second wife in 1955.

The half-sister of Lord Sholto Douglas of Kirtleside, in southern Scotland, had just given birth to the couple's daughter, Margaret, and, despite Salinger's growing wealth from sales of his seminal novel, Catcher In The Rye, her relatives believed she was forced to live a frugal lifestyle on the couple's New Hampshire estate.

Lord Douglas's widow, Lady Douglas, speaking for the first time about the link following Salinger's death last week, said she posted the children's clothes to her sister-in-law.

In the late 1950s, Claire Salinger was living a reclusive life in Cornish, New Hampshire, with her writer husband, a few years after publication of his worldwide best-seller. By that time, the author of the book which has become a classic of literature was amassing a fortune. The book still sells 250,000 copies a year.

But Lady Douglas, now 92, says Claire told her the couple were living in a "hut" with no running water. She was desperately unhappy because she had suffered several miscarriages.

"We used to think, 'poor Claire, having to slum it like that'," said Lady Douglas. "I remember making a tremendous parcel of little dresses which my daughter Katharine had grown out of and sending them to her.

"We didn't know how successful Jerry's book was – one didn't think about the actual amount of money somehow – and now I laugh to think how I sent all those clothes to her."

Claire, the daughter of art critic Robert Langton Douglas, went to the United States to complete her education. The couple met at a party in 1954 – three years after the publication of Catcher In The Rye – when Salinger was 34 and Claire, a student, was 19.

They married in February 1955 and Salinger presented her with the novella Franny And Zooey as a wedding present. The character of Franny Glass is widely believed to have been based on Claire.

The couple were also initiated, on Salinger's instigation, into the path of Kriya yoga in a small store-front Hindu temple in Washington DC, adopting a relatively frugal lifestyle.

A daughter, Margaret (known as Peggy), was born in December of that year and a son, Matthew, was born in 1960, a period in which the couple retreated to their country estate.

Lady Douglas said she and her late husband, a much-decorated former Marshal of the Royal Air Force and chairman of British European Airways in the 1950s and 1960s, gradually became aware of the isolated life the Salingers were leading on the 90-acre estate at Cornish and how Claire was becoming disenchanted with the lifestyle. In 1957, spiralling into depression, she had run away from Salinger, but had been persuaded to return.

"They were living in something like a hut at one stage with no running water, and Claire had to go about carrying buckets of water," said Lady Douglas, a former haute couture model. "She got fed up with it all and had several miscarriages. She ended up becoming a sort of women's libber, burning bras across America. After that, we lost touch."

The clothes parcels may have formed a lifeline from home for Claire. Salinger increasingly isolated his wife from her family and friends, cutting almost all contact with the outside world when she was four months' pregnant.

By 1966, the lonely life at Cornish appeared to have drained Claire's strength.

Dr Gerard Gaudrault, who examined her, wrote: "She complained of nervous tension, sleeplessness and loss of weight, and gave me a history of marital problems with her husband which allegedly caused her condition.

"My examination indicated that the condition I found would naturally follow from the complaints of marital discord given to me."

The couple divorced in 1967 and the last mention of Claire came in 2000 when Peggy published her own memoirs. She told interviewers her mother was working as a Jungian analyst in California.

Peggy Salinger's 2000 book was not complimentary about her father, saying he drank his urine, spoke in tongues and rarely had sex with her mother.

According to Peggy, who is now 54, her father – a US counterintelligence agent in wartime Europe – arrested a young Nazi party functionary named Sylvia and married her. The marriage did not last long.

By the time he met Douglas, Salinger was following the advice of an Indian mystic and studying Scientology, homeopathy and Christian Science.

The writer kept his wife "a virtual prisoner", she claimed.

She said that that since her parents were rarely intimate, her conception was all but an accident. When the writer's wife became pregnant, he found her abhorrent.

Her memoir was aimed at deciphering her unhappy childhood – she suffered from bulimia – in print, as she was "absolutely determined not to repeat with my son what had been done with me".

Salinger had not published anything new since 1965 and remained publicly silent for years. In the last decade, he had continued to live with his third wife, a nurse in her thirties.

He died from natural causes at the age of 91.

Classic that spoke to generations

Sometimes it can be a burden to do something so fantastic the first time around. In 1951, when Jerome David Salinger wrote his first and only full novel, The Catcher In The Rye, at the age of 32, he created what many regard as the perfect book.

His story of alienated adolescent Holden Caulfield's disgust at a world filled with "phoneys" broke new ground by articulating so acutely the disaffection of young people with the adult world they are expected to join.

He created a highly readable and exceptionally popular story that was regarded as a literary masterpiece, an instant classic that became beloved of generations of literature students. Even today it sells a quarter of a million copies a year.

But Salinger's subsequent writing – a series of novellas and short stories – never achieved the same unanimous acclaim as his debut.

Perhaps that is why, after the publication of a short story, Hapworth 16, 1924, in the New Yorker magazine in 1965, Salinger delivered nothing more. He shunned all publicity and angrily defended any attempts to infringe his privacy at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire.