'The word "mesmerising" is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove' Financial Times 'Reading is a form of escape and an avid reader is an escape artist...' Brilliantly original, funny and clever Honor Clark, Spectator , Book of the Year Growing up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, Sally's childhood world was filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God - their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally's baby brother vanishes from his pram, she becomes suspicious of the activities going on around her. What happened to Baby David and the woman called Poor Sue? And where did all the people singing and wailing prayers in the front room suddenly go? Disappearing into a world of books and reading, Sally adopts the tried and tested methods of Miss Marple. Taking books for hints and clues, she turns herself into a reading detective. Her discovery of Jane Eyre marks the beginning of a vivid journey through Victorian literature where she also finds the kind, eccentric figure of Charles Dickens' Betsey Trotwood. These characters soon become her heroines, acting as a part of an alternative family, offering humour and guidance during many difficult moments in Sally's life. Combining the voices of literary characters with those of her real-life counterparts, Girl With Dove reads as a magical series of strange encounters, climaxing with a comic performance of Shakespeare in the children's home where Sally is eventually sent. Weaving literary classics with a young girl's coming of age story, this is a book that testifies to the transformative power of reading and the literary imagination. Mixing fairy tale, literary classics, nursery rhymes and folklore, it is the story of a child's adventure in wonderland and search for truth in an adult world often cast in deep shadow.

Girl With Dove: A Life Built by Books

Biographies & Memoirs

BAYLEY, SALLY

Community & Culture

William Collins

‘Nobody writes like Sally Bayley’ Lemn Sissay\nFrom the brilliantly original and critically acclaimed Sally Bayley, a literary story of working class childhood, absent or broken men and the power of literature to save and rebuild a world. 
In Sally Bayley’s childhood, the men were often missing. Missing because they were drunk, or out of work, or wandering. Or missing because their behaviour meant women banned them from the house. 
The man who was around for Sally was Shakespeare, and he brought men with him to fill the gaps. Sally grew up with a troupe of sad kings and lonely heroes. Her mind ran away from home with Falstaff and Prince Hal, with deceivers and mavericks and geniuses. 
In her signature and extraordinary style, this is Sally’s story of her childhood – one lived with darkness snapping at heels, with real and imagined people passing through interchangeably, and with trauma a spiky memory to be skirted and avoided. 
Inventive, literary and adventurous, this is a story of hard childhood and a testament to the way that great literature and its characters can guard an imagination against the bad.

No Boys Play Here: A Story of Shakespeare and My Family’s Missing Men

Arts & Literature

In a beautiful literary exploration, Sally Bayley tracks the evolution – and the potential twenty first century death of – the diary, mourning what it means to lose the art of writing simply for oneself. 
Diaries hold all manner of things: they allow us a moment to be completely personal, to self-aggrandise, to focus on self-reflection without concern of what someone on the outside might think. Discovered or published diaries of the past have also provided glimpses into history, eras and minds gone by, especially the inner lives otherwise unknown. 
Tracing the history of the diary from Samuel Pepys, whose record of the Great Plague and Great Fire of London informed history, through the likes of Virginia Woolf’s personal confessions in the twentieth century, and up to the age of social media, Sally Bayley explores the beauty and the power of recording one’s own life. 
Taking this thought all the way up to our era of exposure, with confessional journalism and social media barrage, Bayley explores what we might lose as individuals if we let go of the diary as private confidante, choosing instead a culture of public disclosure.

The Private Life of the Diary: From Pepys to Tweets – A History of the Diary as an Art Form

Diaries keep secrets, harboring our fantasies and fictional histories. They are substitute boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses and friends. But in this age of social media, the role of the diary as a private confidante has been replaced by a culture of public self-disclosure. This is an elegantly-told story of the evolution—and perhaps death—of the diary. It traces its origins to 17th-century naval administrator, Samuel Pepys, and continues to 20th-century diarist Virginia Woolf, who recorded everything from her personal confessions about her irritation with her servants to her memories of Armistice Day and the solar eclipse of 1927. Sally Bayley explores how diaries can sometimes record our lives as we live them, but that we often indulge our fondness for self-dramatization, like the teenaged Sylvia Plath who proclaimed herself "The Girl Who Would be God." This book is an examination of the importance of writing and self-reflection as a means of forging identity. It mourns the loss of the diary as an acutely private form of writing, and champions it as a conduit to self-discovery, allowing us to ask ourselves the question: Who or What am I in relation to the world?

The Private Life of the Diary: From Pepys to Tweets: A History of the Diary as an Art Form

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Unbound

In this study of space and place, Sally Bayley examines the meaning of ‘home’ in American literature and culture. Moving from the nineteenth-century homestead of Emily Dickinson to the present-day reality of Bob Dylan, Bayley investigates the relationship of the domestic frontier to the wide-open spaces of the American outdoors. In contemporary America, she argues, the experience of home is increasingly isolated, leading to unsettling moments of domestic fallout. At the centre of the book is the exposed and often shifting domain of the domestic threshold: Emily Dickinson’s doorstep, Edward Hopper’s doors and windows, and Harper Lee’s front porch. Bayley tracks these historically fragile territories through contemporary literature and ﬁlm, including Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford – works that explore local, domestic territories as emblems of nation. The culturally potent sites of the american home – the hearth, porch, backyard, front lawn, bathroom, and basement – are positioned in relation to the more conﬂicted sites of the American motel and hotel.

Home on the Horizon: America's Search for Space, from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan

Arts & Photography

Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers