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.
Family, early life and education
Vickers was born in Liverpool. Her year of birth was thought to be 1948, but an article 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. They then became committed socialists. 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' 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. Salley went on to read English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge.
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. She gave up her psychoanalyticwork in 2002 because she found "seeing patients" was incompatible with writing novels, although she still lectures on the connections between literature and psychology.
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. In 2011 she contributed a short story "Why Willows Weep" to an anthology supporting The Woodland Trust. The anthology - - 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. 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". She lives in Notting Hill. 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'. She said she had a much younger physiological age than her actual age of 70, with low cholesterol and good fitness.
