Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
neglectedbooks.com
Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#2This article was absolutely incredible, and I expect it to land on The Hacker News Community with a dull thud. But huge thanks to bdr for highlighting it.
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#3This article was absolutely incredible, and I expect it to land on The Hacker News Community with a dull thud. But huge thanks to bdr for highlighting it.
Who is bdr?
I actually know Brad (who runs the site) so this is quite a pleasant surprise for me to see it here!
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#4This article was absolutely incredible, and I expect it to land on The Hacker News Community with a dull thud. But huge thanks to bdr for highlighting it.
Who is bdr? I actually know Brad (who runs the site) so this is quite a pleasant surprise for me to see it here!
The person who submitted this article: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bdr
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#5This article was absolutely incredible, and I expect it to land on The Hacker News Community with a dull thud. But huge thanks to bdr for highlighting it.
I'll second this comment. The article is gripping.
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#6I saw this quotation in The Economist: "Success is random. Bestsellers are random. So that's why we are the Random House." (Markus Dohle, Penguin Random House)
Reading about Kathleen Sully I wonder again to what extent critical acclaim is as random as commercial success.
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#7> Her name appears in no encyclopaedia, in no dictionary of biography, in no other survey of the English novel.
So the author writes in 2022, but her Wikipedia lemma was created in 2018 — by the same author though, the omission is not too strange given that they specifically mention the creation of that article later on.
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#8"One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game."
Blithely written about the days when Agatha Christie topped best-seller lists.
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#9"One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game." Blithely written about the days when Agatha Christie topped best-seller lists.
I think the writer means literary in the narrower sense of 'literary fiction'. Christie was a genre writer; like F/SF etc. I understand that wasn't quite respectable in the upper echelons of the book world. Certainly the reviewers in places like the TLS would be primarily interested in literary fiction.
Re: Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
#10"One reason for her critical neglect is that she didn’t fit in—a reflection of the institutional prejudices of the English literary world. She was a woman writing when writing was a man’s game—not just a man’s game, but a public school/university-educated man’s game." Blithely written about the days when Agatha Christie topped best-seller lists.
Agatha Christie is not remembered for being a literary darling, but for being a huge commercial and pop-cultural success. She wrote mystery thrillers, and towered over the genre for decades - and still does in many ways. But the quoted bit is specifically about literary insiders, and the boxes that a given writer may or may not fit into. Which may include gender norms.
From reading the article, Sully being neglected by critics may well have been caused in part by her writings falling outside the expectations of both the literary and broad readerships, and neither really knowing what to make of her. Ironically causing her legacy to end up marooned because of the very traits that make the texts interesting.