Kathleen Sully

Kathleen Sully (14 April 1910 – 4 September 2001) was an English novelist.

Life Sully was the second of seven children born to Albert and Kate Coussell. Albert was an engineer and the family moved numerous times around London during Kathleen's childhood. According to a short biographical sketch on the dust jacket of her first novel, Canal in Moonlight, she left school at fifteen but later studied dress design at Barrett Street Trade School. The same source reports that "She has enjoyed a varied career as a domestic, life attendant, dress model, dress cutter, dress designer, dress-shop owner, professional swimmer and diver, canvasser, bus conductress, cinema usherette, free-lance artist and writer, tracer in the Admiralty, and dress-maker."

She married Charles Sully in Willesden, Middlesex in 1932. The 1939 census recorded them as living in Weston-Super-Mare, where Charles worked as an aeronautical engineer and Kathleen as a housewife. They had three children: two daughters, then a son.

In 1946, she published two children's books, Small Creatures and Stony Stream, with illustrations by Rene Cloke, part of a series titled "Truth in a Tale" published by Edmund Ward Ltd. In 1948, she attended St. Albans Art College and in 1950 attended the Gaddesden Teacher Training College, from which she earned a teaching certificate and took a teaching post in Art and English. Writing in the Sunday Times, Anthony Rhodes called it "one of the finest novels of its kind I have read."

In 1957, Lindsay Anderson convinced her to write a play for an innovative series he produced with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. On 30 June 1957, in his professional debut as a director, Anderson staged the play, with Ian Bannen in the title role, without decor. Her fourth novel, Merrily to the Grave, for which Elizabeth Bowen praised Sully's 'forceful, bizarre, singular gifts,' was adapted as a radio play for the BBC in 1959.

In the space of fifteen years, Sully published seventeen novels. She worked exclusively with the publisher Peter Davies. Two themes were consistently cited by reviewers: her originality (Jack Denton Scott: "She is something quite on her own"

In response to a questionnaire for Gale Research's Contemporary Authors series in 1979, she wrote, "Main interest now and ever since I could think: Man--why and whence.... Have written since a child but stuff mostly too off-beat for publication. Interests in general: philosophy; art; realistic literature; dancing; swimming and diving; teaching; diet and health--mental and physical; why the chicken crossed the road." She identified her politics as Liberal ("if anything") and her religion as Christian ("not a church-goer").

Works

Children's books Small Creatures, 1946 Stony Stream, 1946

Novels Canal in Moonlight, 1955 (published in US as Bikka Road by Coward-McCann) Canaille, 1956 Through the Wall, 1957 Merrily to the Grave, 1958 Burden of the Seed, 1958 A Man Talking to Seagulls, 1959 Shade of Eden, 1960 Skrine, 1960 A Man on the Roof, 1961 The Undesired, 1961 The Fractured Smile, 1965 Not Tonight, 1966 Dear Wolf, 1967 Horizontal Image, 1968 A Breeze on a Lonely Road, 1969 Island in Moonlight, 1970 A Look at the Tadpoles, 1970

Play The Waiting of Lester Abbs, 1957