from Hacker News

Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)

by bdr on 11/14/23, 5:25 PM with 17 comments

• by textfiles on 11/15/23, 5:54 AM

  This 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.

• by toyg on 11/15/23, 12:56 PM

  I found myself attracted the most to the plight of her daughter. "Her letter said why see me now I am successful / and not before" - that's such a cruel, cruel thing to say to your long-lost offspring.

• by bloak on 11/15/23, 8:11 AM

  I 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.

• by Freak_NL on 11/15/23, 10:53 AM

  > 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.

• by tatrajim on 11/15/23, 7:45 PM

  One hopes that all her works will one day be available in print again, or at least in electronic form.

• by B1FF_PSUVM on 11/15/23, 10:58 AM

  "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.