Pond Life

In a digital age, Pond Life asks who will record the lives that do not appear on screen. Enter Edith Cull, unmarried and working as an occasional cover teacher. Edith’s life lacks biography. Her chief pleasure and source of excitement is the cinema. Encouraged by on-screen fantasies, Edith attaches herself to the local chemist, the stalwart Mr. Jarvis. In the same town lives Dorothy Fortescue married to the noble Henry. Behind her manor walls, Dorothy lives out another form of spectral existence. As lady of the manor, Dorothy summons “Pond Man” who arrives to build her a garden pond; and upon the surface of her pond Dorothy projects all the scenery of her boredom and grief.

The lives of these two women reflect and illuminate one another and in a crucial moment of misreading their lives intertwine...

Sally Bayley is the author of a series of ground-breaking books which defy category and genre. All explore the relationship between biography, autobiography and fiction through myth, fable, fairytale and forms of lyrical and visual memory. Published works include her three-part coming-of-age sequence, Girl with Dove, No Boys Play Here and The Green Lady and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary.

Sally hosts and performs the highly successful podcast A Reading Life, A Writing Life, designed to inspire creative writing, innovative reading, and artistic responses to living. Her next book will be Pond Life.

‘Bayley’s adeptness with mobile identities, with class as well as gender, gives her unexpected sympathies.’
— Marina Warner, LRB

Which each book, Sally Bayley seems to invent a new literary genre.’
— Matt Rowland Hill, author of Original Sin