Dr Sally Bayley, FRSL

Sally Bayley teaches as a College Lecturer for Visiting Students in English, film and creative writing at Hertford and also for the Sarah Lawrence Programme at Wadham College, Oxford. From 2018-20, she was a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, where she taught academic and creative writing.

Sally has written widely on the life and artistic legacy of Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. Her publications include a study of the American home, Home on the Horizon: America’s Search for Space (Peter Lang, 2010) and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary: from Pepys to Tweets (Unbound, 2016).

She is now completing a series of three books which explore a child’s escape into literature as a form of retreat in the face of difficult social circumstances. The first, Girl with Dove: a Life Built by Books (William Collins, 2018) was Radio 4’s Book of the Week in January 2019, and a Spectator Book of the Year (2018). Girl with Dove is now part of the A Level coursework syllabus. The second illustrated part, No Boys Play Here, was published in January 2021, and tells the story of the same young girl in search of a lost father and uncle through Shakespeare’s characters. 

Photo credit: Alexandra Kelly