Safe Return Doubtful

Seventy years ago it is easy to understand how dark and disturbing literature fell quickly out of favour, and off the bookshelves never to return, if it wasn’t for hardworking folk like those at the Neglected Books website.

Katherine Sully was such an author, and this, a very good example of such a work.
It is set in a rundown boarding house in a grim and dismal Brighton. The residents of the house have something in common, they are all fallen from a once higher status; stage actors, sex workers, department store salesgirls, drunks and thieves.

In the basement, Henry and Bertha Titheridge have grown so intolerable to each other that Henry has cut their double bed in two. Elsie stitches and re-sells stockings and spends her evenings attempting to improve a soprano voice she thinks is better than it actually is.

But the landlady, Hesta Blazey, in her late fifties, is kind and generous, and like a mother to them all. To many of her residents, it is her that keeps them going. She makes sure they socialise, and generates a caring atmosphere in what otherwise would be a bleak arrangement.

This is not going to end well though. This is Sully, and as I said at the outset, her work is dark and disturbing. A journalist reviewing her in the Melbourne newspaper The Age sums her up very well.. Kathleen Sully writes her novels in a mood of dreamy horror. Quietly, and with scarcely a strong word, she reveals the squalor of the world. But she does not embrace squalor. She makes it rather the materials of a poetry which affirms the deeply buried and disguised dignity of man.

This is out of print, but available digitally for free at the Internet archive.
I’m off to discover more Sully.. her writing is very much to my tastes..

My GoodReads score 4 / 5