Full Details
Sally Vickers
| Full Name: | Sally Vickers |
| Born: | Liverpool, England |
| Occupation: | Novelist, Teacher, Psychotherapist |
| Nationality: | British |
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Biography
Salley Vickers is a British novelist who also writes poetry.
Vickers was born in Liverpool. Her year of birth was thought to be 1948, but an article about her in April 2020 gave her age as 70, which suggests she was born in 1949 or 1950. However, she mentions in a discussion on the 'Confessions' podcast with Giles Frasier that she was a "baby of the National Health Service", and her doctor's first "National Health baby" in 1948. Her mother Freddie, a social worker, and her father, J. O. N. Vickers, a trades union leader, were both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain until 1956. They were friends of J. B. S. Haldane, and T. H. White had taught her father English at school.
Her father was a committed supporter of Irish republicanism, and her first name 'Salley' is spelled with an 'e' because it is the Irish for 'willow' (cognate with Latin: salix, salicis), as in the W B Yeats poem, "Down by the Salley Gardens", a favourite of her parents.
She was brought up in Barleston Hall, Stoke-on-Trent, and in Chiswick where she attended Strand-on-the Green primary school, which she acknowledges as a first-rate state school with superb teachers. She won a state scholarship to St Paul's Girls' School, which caused her father some ideological consternation but her mother was supportive. Whilst at St Paul's, however, her father encouraged her to work to ensure that she experienced working life and society very different from that of her more affluent school peers.
Salley went on to read English Literature at Newnham College, Cambridge.
Following university she taught children with special needs. She also taught English literature at Stanford, Oxford and the Open University, specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry. She was also a WEA and further education tutor for adult education classes. During 2012-13 she was a Royal Literary Fund fellow of her alma mater, Newnham College, Cambridge.
After her initial teaching career, she retrained as a Jungian analytical psychotherapist, subsequently working in the NHS. She specialised in helping people who were creatively blocked. She gave up her psychoanalytic work in 2002 because she found "seeing patients" was incompatible with writing novels, although she still lectures on the connections between literature and psychology.
Works in the WWEnd Database
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