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.
I found myself attracted the most to the plight of her daughter. <i>"Her letter said why see me now I am successful / and not before"</i> - 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)<p>Reading about Kathleen Sully I wonder again to what extent critical acclaim is as random as commercial success.
> Her name appears in no encyclopaedia, in no dictionary of biography, in no other survey of the English novel.<p>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.
<i>"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."</i><p>Blithely written about the days when Agatha Christie topped best-seller lists.