Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)
neglectedbooks.comThis 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.
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
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.
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.
Many years back Yahoo did an experiment with ranking music. They found that every time they ran it, different songs would bubble to the top as "best". From memory, something about early front-runners getting a lock-in.
Edit: found a link https://unbiasx.com/the-yahoo-musiclab-experiment/
You can see the same scenario run out with HN or Reddit comments, where early comments become the "best".
>I wonder again to what extent critical acclaim is as random as commercial success.
you can't acclaim what you've never read.
However there are a lot of studies that indicate critical acclaim also seems related to attending the right institutions of higher education, which would indicate a decrease in randomness.
I guess that suggests commercial success, which is random, is more fair than critical acclaim - which is rigged.
> 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.
One hopes that all her works will one day be available in print again, or at least in electronic form.
"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.
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.
The article may seem to take that view, but dispels it at the same time: "a list of 100 or so English woman novelists of the 20th century, a list running from Margaret Atwood to Virginia Woolf." Then it comes up with other possible explanations, all speculative. There's no conclusion.
Virgina Woolf wasn’t so highly regarded until mid century, well after her death. Before that, her reputation did not extend outside a circle of modernists. The Bloomsbury scene in general were countercultural even within the English literary-fiction world.