Salley Vickers

Salley Vickers (born 1948 in Liverpool) is an English novelist whose works include the word-of-mouth bestseller 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. She also writes poetry.

Family, early life and education

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 and then very committed socialists.^[1] 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' (from the 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.^[2]

Salley went on to read English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge.^[3]

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.^[4] 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.^[5]

Psychoanalysis

After her initial teaching career, she retrained as an Jungian analytical psychotherapist, subsequently working in the NHS. She specialised in helping people who were creatively blocked.^[6] 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.^[7]

Writing

In 2000 her first novel, Miss Garnet's Angel was published and she became a full-time writer, since publishing several novels and other works as well as contributing to various newspaper and magazines.

In 2002, she was a judge for the Booker Prize for Fiction.^[3]

In 2011 she contributed a short story "Why Willows Weep" to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology - Why Willows Weep - has so far helped The Woodland Trust plant approximately 50,000 trees, and is to be re-released in paperback format in 2016.

Personal life

She has two sons from her marriage with Martin Brown.^[8] 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".^[7] She lives in Notting Hill.^[4]

Novels

• Vickers, Salley (2000). Miss Garnet’s Angel. OCLC 799184817. ^[9]
• Vickers, Salley (2001). Instances of the Number 3. ^[10]
• Vickers, Salley (2003). Mr Golightly’s Holiday. Harper Collins. ^[11]
• Vickers, Salley (2006). The Other Side of You. ^[12]
• Vickers, Salley (2007). Where Three Roads Meet.  (part of the Canongate Myth Series)^[13]
• Vickers, Salley (2009). Dancing Backwards. Fourth Estate. ^[14]
• Vickers, Salley (2009). Sweet and Comfortable Words. Picador. ISBN 978-0330489737. 
• Vickers, Salley (November 2010). Aphrodite's Hat, The Collected Stories of Salley Vickers. Fourth Estate. ^[15]
• Vickers, Salley (1 November 2012). The Cleaner of Chartres. Viking. ISBN 978-0670922123. 

References

External links

• Official website
• Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion by John Cornwell. Review by Salley Vickers(subscription required)
• Salley Vickers discusses Belief with Joan Bakewell on BBC Radio 3
• Woman's Hour 9 July 2009 BBC Radio 4