logo
livingroom

decorative bar

biographies


corner Last update of this page: May 22nd 2003 corner
Kay Dick
(July 29, 1915 - October 19, 2001) U.K.

Kay Dick

Novelist and literary critic

separator

Kay Dick (aka Jeremy Scott) was an illigimate child and never learnt the identity of her father. Her mother gave birth to her at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, London, and left with just two shillings and sixpence. Kay acquired the surname Dick at the age of seven when her mother married a rich Swiss businessman and became Kate Frances Dick. Kay Dick received an education at a boarding school in Geneva and then at the Lycée Française de Londres, in South Kensington, London.

She worked in bookselling and publishing, including the mail publicity department of Foyles. During the Second World War she worked on the New Statesmen. She later worked for the publisher George Newnes and then became the first woman director of an English publisher at P. S. King and Son. She then worked under John Brophy as assistant editor of John O'London's Weekly. This was followed by an appointment by Heinemann publishers to be editor of the short-lived literary periodical The Windmill where she edited 13 issues using the pseudonym Edward Lane. During this time she secured the first publication of W. S. Maugham's short novel Catalina.

From 1940 to 1962 she shared her life with the novelist Kathleen Farrell in Great Missenden and at Kathleen's house in Flask Walk, Hampstead, north London. They entertained many famous writers including C. P. Snow and his wife Pamela Hansford-Johnson, Angus Wilson, Stevie Smith, Olivia Manning, and Muriel Spark.

In 1964 the couple split up but lived close to each other in Brighton and were in daily contact. Kay Dick lived in basement flat on the Brighton seafront. However they were not always amicable and Kathleen Farrel became so piqued in 1983 that she destroyed all the letters that she had received from Kay Dick. Kathleen Farrell died in 1999. Kay Dick died three years later in Brighton, East Sussex.

separator

Source: excerpts from: The Knitting Circle, U.K. - http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/people.html

Her work:

  • London's Hour: as seen through the eyes of the firefighters (1942)
  • Late Joys at the Players Theatre (1943)
  • The Mandrake Root (1946)
  • At Close of Eve (1947)
  • By the Lake (1949)
  • The Uncertain Element (1950)
  • Young Man (1951)
  • An Affair Of Love (1953)
  • Solitaire (1958)
  • Pierrot: an investigation into the commedia dell'arte (1960)
  • Sunday (1962)
  • Bizarre and Arabesque (1967)
  • Ivy and Stevie (1971)
  • Writers at Work (1972)
  • Friends and Friendship (1974)
  • They: A Sequence of Unease (1977)
  • The Shelf (1984)
Click on the letter D to go back to the list of names

corner © Matt & Andrej Koymasky, 1997 - 2008 corner