In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, the critically acclaimed author, Oxford scholar, literature teacher and performer Dr Sally Bayley chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting The Green Lady: A Spirit, A Story, A Place.
The Green Lady
The Green Lady is an experimental mix of biography, fiction and family history. It continues the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as an imagined biography that urgently understands the need for a space of one’s own in which to thrive. As one of the story’s several foster children, Sally reminds us that families and homes can be found and built within literature and the arts as well as nature’s green spaces. The Green Lady is the third part of Sally Bayley’s trilogy, an experimental literary coming-of- age story of a young girl immersing herself in the world of lyrical language poetry. The first book in the trilogy, Girl with Dove, is a coming-of-age story about a young girl who escapes into a world of books as a form of survival.
Girl with Dove
In Girl with Dove, Sally adopts three literary characters: Miss Marple, Jane Eyre and David Copperfield, and they lead her through a series of real and literary adventures that form the mystery and muddle of her childhood.
Radio 4: ‘Book of the Week 2019’
Spectator: ‘A Book of the Year in 2019’
In Girl with Dove, Sally Bayley invents a new genre. The climax of this novelised memoir is the child’s decision to leave behind her birth family and sign herself into the care of Social Services. But not before she takes her adopted literary relatives with her.
Girl with Dove is an immersive literary experience delivered in the voice of a child who turns words into active agents of her fate. Lauded as a completely original work, it explores a child’s search for artistic education and a sense of self. Lyrical and playful, Sally’s writing transports us into an eccentric world of teachers, guardians and guiding spirits of place.
No Boys Play Here
The second book in this coming-of-age trilogy is No Boys Play Here.
No Boys Play Here shares the story of a teenage girl in search of her lost father and uncle through the characters and plots of Shakespeare’s plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV. Illustrated with drawings by Arizona Smith, the story unfolds as a series of strange theatrical scenes in the mind of a young girl intent on finding the missing men in her history.
Listed in the top ten books recommended by la Repubblica, Italy
Part English family saga, part Medieval and Tudor history learned from school, No Boys Play Here is a re-imagining of English myth and folklore from the point of view of a serving boy —Francis, a girl in disguise—who waits upon the king. Moving back and forth between family life and Shakespearean scenes, Sally asks some challenging questions about how it is that some children grow up poor and what happens to make them so?
Trailer for NO BOYS PLAY HERE, January 2021.
Animation by Suzie Hanna based on the No Boys Play Here
Drawings by Arizona Smith.
Voice is Sally Bayley’s and piano by Bobby Hanna.
https://vimeo.com/499750266
Girl with Dove and No Boys Play Here are literary experiments that remain true to unconscious instincts and impulses: the life of the body as it meets with the imagination. Below is one reader’s description of the experience of reading Girl with Dove and No Boys Play Here:
I’m in the water and I feel supported, but I can’t quite touch the ground and I’m really excited by that — and this from someone who really likes concrete things. I have complete faith in your writing, so it doesn’t matter that I don’t understand everything. I’m in the water and I’m suspended, and I really love that feeling.
The Green Lady
Finally, The Green Lady sees the child-narrator complete her journey from reader to writer with the help of folklore and the laws of nature, guided by the histories of ancestors and ancestral spirits introduced to her through her grandmother’s knowledge of the natural world. The wind, the rain, plants, trees and flowers sow deep seeds in the child’s literary imagination, offering her ways of seeing the world through botany, meteorology and poetry.
Sally Bayley at a book signing for The Green Lady
The Green Lady is also a deeply insightful and poignant exploration of the relationships between children and their teachers. Moved by her female teachers, and guided by the artist J.M.W. Turner, Sally’s protagonist goes in search of her maternal ancestors, in particular her grandmother, Edna May Turner.
Following the narratives of other women in history who have taken different routes to independence and artistic freedom—including the educational suffragist Mary Neal, actress Margaret Rutherford, and poet Stevie Smith—Sally considers the paths to happiness and the limitations social convention imposes.
Listen to a sample of The Green Lady read by Sally Bayley.
Below is one reader’s description of the experience of reading The Green Lady:
I rarely found a book that I wanted to read again so quickly. Like when devouring the best quality chocolate and coffee, you feel your life has been enhanced in the moment of reading but are also encouraged to want more of the best and not be satisfied with mediocrity. Every page contains a visual richness, poetry and musicality, which never feels contrived and has genuine down to earth humour. This book gave me a kinder and more compassionate view of my own past.
Praise for The Green Lady: A Spirit, A Story, A Place
The Green Lady is a beguiling, experimental mixture of biography, fiction and family history. The prose is glancing and poetic, suffused with gentle melancholy, yet bursting with connections that anticipate, tease and delightful. There is much here of art and literature as succour for the soul, and this charming, original and poignant book shines with intellectual and imaginative fire.
Spectator
With each new book, Sally Bayley seems to invent a new literary genre. The Green Lady is another bulletin from her unique imagination - a marvel of formal originality and verbal ingenuity. There is no other writer remotely like her.
Matt Rowland Hill, author of Original Sins
In a beguiling blend of memoir and storytelling, the author of Girl with Dove and No Boys Play Here explores the relationship between children and their teachers, and the sustaining power of literature, especially for those growing up in poverty or dealing with neglect and abuse. In search of a better plot, Bayley’s protagonist seeks out her maternal ancestors, and other women in history who have paved a path to independence, happiness and artistic freedom in a space of one’s own. No one writes quite like Bayley.
Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
A unique piece of writing which is enthralling and leaves one tasting the salt air of nostalgia. The reader delights in her word play, her deftness and playfulness, painterly and yet essentially three dimensional: a living canvas which is a feat of magic and alchemy.
Pratima Mitchell
Dr Sally Bayley
Photograph by Alexandra Kelly
About Sally Bayley
Dr Sally Bayley is a fiction and non-fiction writer who is interested in the shifting relationship between genres. As a child, she absorbed the sounds and rhythms of poetry, ballads and folksongs, and these patterns inform the structure of her storytelling. One reader has described her books as ‘rhapsodies’, which means ‘to stitch a song’.
Sally is a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches academic writing, literature, film and creative writing for the Sarah Lawrence visiting program at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2018 to 2020, she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. In 2021, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In 1990, Sally was the first child to go to university from West Sussex County Council Care services. She studied at St Andrews University, then travelled to America, where she taught aesthetic education in midwestern schools and universities and foundation arts courses to adults in inner city Ohio. Sally is interested in the Liberal Arts model of education and believes anyone can think or write to a high level with the right encouragement and practice.
Sally lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford, where she is surrounded by the sights and sounds of nature and sustained by reading and writing. Most days she swims in the river.
‘A Reading Life. A Writing Life’, Sally’s Podcast
In her ‘literature and life’ podcast, A Reading Life. A Writing Life, Sally invites us into her life, showing us how books have the power to change your life. Her podcast is designed to encourage creative responses to life. It also aims to encourage creative work and writers and teachers and artists all over the world.
Sally has recently been diagnosed with an auto-immune disease, but this is not a misery memoir podcast; Sally shows us how literature and connection to nature can console and give courage and insight even at the most challenging times. With the teaching and study of English Literature in steep decline in the UK, this is a passionate and urgently needed defence of the possibilities of literature to console, inspire and transform.
James Bowen edits A Reading Life. A Writing Life and Lucie Richter-Mahr has occasionally edited it. The original musical contributions are created by composer Paul Sebastian and guitarist Dylan Gwalia.
Each episode is accompanied by extensive ‘further reading’ notes, encouraging listeners to delve deeper into the world of literature.
To learn more about Sally Bayley, you’ll find her here:
Praise for ‘A Reading Life. A Writing Life’
I’ve rarely felt so immersed in a podcast. Beautiful and profound.
Hugh Montgomery, Senior Editor, BBC Culture
Utterly spellbinding.
Gayle Bell, poet, Behind the Plots
Magical. Words drip off her tongue.
Annie Skinner, Behind Closed Doors