The Times’s critic Philip Howard opted to describe it as the latter, and I’m inclined to agree, not least because the final episode, “Hallo Love,” was originally published as a stand-alone piece two years earlier, in 1975. Reading it was like reading the work of an entirely different writer.Īt less than a hundred pages, They is either a novella consisting of nine chapters, or a collection of nine interlinked short stories. This disquieting, lean, pared-back dystopian tale, which won the now defunct South-East Arts Literature Prize, is a complete departure from her previous volumes. “She must have had great courage,” wrote Dick in an autobiographical piece that detailed the story of her birth, “because illegitimacy in the First World War was a very unpleasant business to be mixed up with, especially for a woman brought up in a reasonably privileged fashion.” But then, almost out of nowhere, I found myself completely bowled over by Dick’s penultimate novel, They: A Sequence of Unease (1977). It’s a loosely autobiographical novel about her childhood (Dick was born in England in 1915, but educated in Geneva, then at the Lycée Française in London, before leaving home at the age of twenty “to mix with a louche set,” as she later put it in an interview) and her relationship with her glamorous single mother. Her fifth work, Sunday (1962), proved more absorbing, especially in its psychological astuteness. Her first four novels- By the Lake (1949), Young Man (1951), An Affair of Love (1953), and Solitaire (1958)-which tell stories of romantic or familial entanglements against the backdrop of refined European settings, were elegant but not especially memorable. Initially, I was slightly disappointed by what I found. Needless to say, I was intrigued enough to immediately hunt down Dick’s books. He describes her as a failed artist, “a talented woman bedeviled by ingratitude and a kind of manic desire to avenge totally imaginary wrongs.” De-lay-Noy’s obituary is less a celebration of Dick’s life and more an all-out character assassination, one that details a litany of grudges maintained, ambitions thwarted, and friendships cruelly smashed to smithereens. “For many years,” wrote the writer and journalist Michael De-la-Noy, “the novelist Kay Dick, who has died aged 86, was at the centre of literary intrigue and gossip.” The claim he then makes-that she “expended far more energy in pursuing personal vendettas and romantic lesbian friendships than in writing books”-is cutthroat enough to smack of a vendetta all of its own. I mention them here, because it was the scathing description of Dick’s treatment of her friends, as detailed in her obituary in the Guardian in 2001, that first attracted my attention. Snow, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Brigid Brophy, Muriel Spark, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, Angus Wilson, and Francis King. A list of the guests regularly entertained by her and her partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, at their Hampstead home-they lived together from 1940 to 1962-includes a host of successful and popular writers of the era, including C. Kay Dick is a name all but forgotten today, but in the midtwentieth century she was at the heart of the London literary scene. This month, she examines an anomalous work, They, in Kay Dick’s already anomalous oeuvre. In her column, Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be.
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