Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022)

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>&quot;Her letter said why see me now I am successful &#x2F; and not before&quot;</i> - that&#x27;s such a cruel, cruel thing to say to your long-lost offspring.

I saw this quotation in The Economist: &quot;Success is random. Bestsellers are random. So that&#x27;s why we are the Random House.&quot; (Markus Dohle, Penguin Random House)<p>Reading about Kathleen Sully I wonder again to what extent critical acclaim is as random as commercial success.

&gt; 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.

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

<i>&quot;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&#x2F;university-educated man’s game.&quot;</i><p>Blithely written about the days when Agatha Christie topped best-seller lists.