Salley Vickers

Salley Vickers is a British novelist whose works include Miss Garnet's Angel, Mr. Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Where Three Roads Meet, a retelling of the Oedipus myth to Sigmund Freud in the last months of his life. The Librarian published in 2018 includes biographical information in Author's Notes. She also writes poetry.

Salley Vickers
Born1948, 1949 or 1950
Liverpool, England, UK
OccupationWriter
NationalityBritish
EducationSt Paul's Girls' School
Alma materNewnham College, Cambridge
Genrefiction
Website
www.salleyvickers.com

Family, early life and education

Vickers was born in Liverpool. Her year of birth was thought to be 1948, but an article[1] about her in April 2020 gave her age as 70, which suggests she was born in 1949 or 1950. Her mother, Freddie, was a social worker and her father, J.O.N. Vickers, a trades union leader, were both members of the British communist party until 1956. They were friends of J.B.S. Haldane and T.H.White had taught her father English at school.[2] They then became committed socialists.[3]

Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism and her first name, 'Salley', is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for 'willow' (cognate with Latin: salix, salicis) as in the W B Yeats poem, "Down by the Salley Gardens" a favourite of her parents.

She was brought up in Stoke-on-Trent and London,. She won a state scholarship to St Paul's Girls' School which caused her father some ideological consternation but her mother was supportive. Whilst at St Paul's however, her father encouraged her to work to ensure that she experienced working life and society very different from that of her more affluent school peers.[4]

Salley went on to read English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge.[5]

Teaching

Following university she taught children with special needs. She also taught English literature at Stanford, Oxford and the Open University specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry.[6] She was also a WEA and further education tutor for adult education classes. During 2012–13 she was a Royal Literary Fund fellow of her alma mater, Newnham College, Cambridge.[7]

Psychotherapy

After her initial teaching career, she retrained as a Jungian analytical psychotherapist, subsequently working in the NHS. She specialised in helping people who were creatively blocked.[8] She gave up her psychoanalytic work in 2002 because she found "seeing patients" was incompatible with writing novels, although she still lectures on the connections between literature and psychology.[9]

Writing

In 2000 her first novel, Miss Garnet's Angel was published and she became a full-time writer. She wrote novels and contributed to newspaper and magazines.

In 2002, she was a judge for the Booker Prize for Fiction.[5]

In 2011 she contributed a short story "Why Willows Weep" to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology - Why Willows Weep - in 2016 had helped The Woodland Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees.

In her 2018 novel The Librarian in her Author's Notes, she describes writing she regards as model or "matchless" by J.B.S. Haldane and Sylvia Townsend Warner.

Personal life

She has two sons from her marriage with Martin Brown.[10] In 2002, her brief second marriage, to the Irish writer and broadcaster Frank Delaney, ended and was dissolved "just as her career as an author took off".[9] She lives in Notting Hill.[6]

In April 2020 she wrote that she hoped to get the COVID-19 virus, 'in order to be granted the immunity to return to the world and lend a hand'.[1] She said she had a much younger physiological age than her actual age of 70, with low cholesterol and good fitness.

Novels
  • Vickers, Salley (2000). Miss Garnet’s Angel. OCLC 799184817.[11]
  • Vickers, Salley (2001). Instances of the Number 3.[12]
  • Vickers, Salley (2003). Mr Golightly’s Holiday. Harper Collins.[13]
  • Vickers, Salley (2006). The Other Side of You.[14]
  • Vickers, Salley (2007). Where Three Roads Meet. (part of the Canongate Myth Series)[15]
  • Vickers, Salley (2009). Dancing Backwards. Fourth Estate.[16]
  • Vickers, Salley (November 2010). Aphrodite's Hat, The Collected Stories of Salley Vickers. Fourth Estate.[17]
  • Vickers, Salley (1 November 2012). The Cleaner of Chartres. Viking. ISBN 978-0670922123.
  • Vickers, Salley (3 November 2016). Cousins. Viking. ISBN 978-0241187715.[18]
  • Vickers, Salley (26 April 2018). The Librarian. Viking. ISBN 978-0241321737.[19]

A projected non-fiction book about The Book of Common Prayer and entitled Sweet and Comfortable Words was never published.

gollark: Get ALL of the vaccines ever.
gollark: Well, you should get as many vaccines as possible.
gollark: We already scanned yours. Palaiologos neural networks are responsible for operating much of our infrastructure.
gollark: This is very ethical, I checked.
gollark: Then, we can run instances of your brain at 200x speed so that you can review all submissions manually.

References
  1. Quinn, Ben (2 April 2020). "Novelist urges volunteers to be infected". The Guardian.
  2. Vickers, Salley (2018). The Librarian. St Ives UK: Viking. p. 380. ISBN 978-0-241-32173-7.
  3. Morris, Linda (24 November 2012). "The Interview: Salley Vickers". Sydney Morning Herald.
  4. Vickers, Salley (3 November 2012). "Five-minute Memoir: Salley Vickers on first-job hell". The Independent.
  5. "Salley Vickers". Booker Prize Foundation. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
  6. O'Kelly, Lisa (5 July 2009). "From couch to ballroom". The Observer.
  7. "Salley Vickers - Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, 2012/13". Archived from the original on 7 September 2013. Retrieved 3 November 2013.
  8. Wroe, Nicholas (28 April 2001). "A story lost and found in Venice". The Guardian.
  9. Lisa O'Kelly (5 July 2009). "From couch to ballroom: Ex-therapist Salley Vickers has always based her characters on parts of herself, she tells Lisa O'Kelly. In her new novel she has them all dancing at sea". London: The Guardian.
  10. "Index entry for marriage of Martin R. Brown and Salley E. Vickers". Transcription of birth, marriage and death registry entries for England and Wales 1837-1983. ONS. Retrieved 30 November 2016.
  11. "Miss Garnet's Angel - Salley Vickers". dooyoo.co.uk. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  12. "Instances of the Number 3: A Novel by Salley Vickers". goodreads.com. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  13. Martinovich, Steven (26 January 2004). "Mr. Golightly's Holiday By Sally Vickers". Enter Stage Right. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  14. Seymenliyska, Elena (22 April 2006). "The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers,". Guardian. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  15. Holtsberry, Kevin (15 January 2009). "Where Three Roads Meet by Sally Vickers". collectedmiscellany.com. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  16. Thompson, Heather (2 August 2009). "Dancing Backwards by Salley Vickers: review". Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  17. Arditti, Michael (19 November 2010). "Aphrodite's Hat by Salley Vickers: review". Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  18. Davies, Stevie (5 November 2016). "Cousins by Salley Vickers review – the mysteries of family love". Guardian. Retrieved 9 August 2017.
  19. Scholes, Lucy (9 November 2018). "The Librarian by Salley Vickers – off the shelf". Financial Times. Retrieved 16 March 2019.
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