The Green Lady

(Hardback)

Available Formats

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

From the critically acclaimed author Sally Bayley, The Green Lady is a poignant, brilliant exploration of the relationships between children and their teachers.
In the style of her memoir Girl with Dove, this book explores a childs search for artistic education and a sense of self. Lyrical and playful, Sally Bayleys writing transports the reader into an eccentric world of teachers, guardians and guiding spirits of place.

Moved by her female teachers, and guided by the artist J.M.W. Turner, Bayleys 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 Bayley considers the paths to happiness and the limitations social convention imposes.

Part novel, part memoir, The Green Lady continues the traditions of Virginia Woolfs Orlando as an imagined biography which urgently understands the need for a space of ones own in which to thrive. As one of the books several foster children, Bayley reminds us that families and homes can be found and built within literature and the arts as well as nature's green spaces.

Reviews

EARLY PRAISE FOR THE GREEN LADY:

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, Bayleys 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 ones own. No one writes quite like Bayleyshes a true, precious original Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller

PRAISE FOR SALLY BAYLEYS GIRL WITH DOVE

This is a very eccentric memoir I liked it, because I was captivated by Sally Bayley's poetic light touch Thanks to the guidance of three beloved fictional characters who came alive in her imagination, young Sally negotiated her way through the jungle of her childhood
The Times

The strangest and most striking memoir I have read in years Her bold poetic prose carries the sinister cackle of Bertha Mason on a warm breeze through St Mary Mead, to be wafted away in comic disdain by Betsey Trotwood
Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

A testament to innocence, resilience and the protective power of the imagination This is a story about the childs need to make sense of chaos and the redemptive power of stories to bestow meaning The word mesmerising is frequently applied to memoirs, but seldom as deservedly as in the case of Girl With Dove, a work suffused with psychological depth, literary inventiveness and subtle brilliance
Financial Times

Bayleys family are compelling, certainly, but its the formidable and moving lines of much-loved prose, sketched long ago in the classics, that provide much of Girl With Doves horsepower
Irish Times

Author Bio

Sally Bayley is a Teaching and Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at the University of Oxford and from September 2018 she will be teaching writing in Oxford as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Sally has written widely on visual responses to literature, including a jointly authored study of Sylvia Plath's relationship to the visual arts: Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual and a study of Plath as a cultural icon: Representing Sylvia Plath. In 2010 she completed a cross-media study of Emily Dickinson as a way of thinking about America's relationship to space and place: Home on the Horizon: America's Search for Space, from Emily Dickinson to Bob Dylan. She is the author of The Private Life of the Diary (Unbound, 2016).