In the style of her memoir Girl with Dove, this book explores a child’s search for artistic education and a sense of self. Lyrical and playful, Sally Bayley’s writing transports the reader into an eccentric world of teachers, guardians and guiding spirits of place.

Moved by her female teachers, and guided by the artist J.M.W. Turner, Bayley’s protagonist goes in search of her maternal ancestors, in particular her grandmother, Edna May Turner. Following the narratives of other women in history who have taken different routes to independence and artistic freedom – including the educational suffragist Mary Neal, actress Margaret Rutherford, and poet Stevie Smith – Bayley considers the paths to happiness and the limitations social convention imposes.

Part novel, part memoir, The Green Lady continues the traditions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as an imagined biography which urgently understands the need for a space of one’s own in which to thrive. As one of the book’s several foster children, Bayley reminds us that families and homes can be found and built within literature and the arts as well as nature’s green spaces.

In the style of her memoir Girl with Dove, this book explores a child’s search for artistic education and a sense of self. Lyrical and playful, Sally Bayley’s writing transports the reader into an eccentric world of teachers, guardians and guiding spirits of place.

Moved by her female teachers, and guided by the artist J.M.W. Turner, Bayley’s protagonist goes in search of her maternal ancestors, in particular her grandmother, Edna May Turner. Following the narratives of other women in history who have taken different routes to independence and artistic freedom – including the educational suffragist Mary Neal, actress Margaret Rutherford, and poet Stevie Smith – Bayley considers the paths to happiness and the limitations social convention imposes.

Part novel, part memoir, The Green Lady continues the traditions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as an imagined biography which urgently understands the need for a space of one’s own in which to thrive. As one of the book’s several foster children, Bayley reminds us that families and homes can be found and built within literature and the arts as well as nature’s green spaces.

Diaries hold all manner of things: they allow us a moment to be completely personal, to self-aggrandise, to focus on self-reflection without concern of what someone on the outside might think. Discovered or published diaries of the past have also provided glimpses into history, eras and minds gone by, especially the inner lives otherwise unknown.

Tracing the history of the diary from Samuel Pepys, whose record of the Great Plague and Great Fire of London informed history, through the likes of Virginia Woolf’s personal confessions in the twentieth century, and up to the age of social media, Sally Bayley explores the beauty and the power of recording one’s own life.

Taking this thought all the way up to our era of exposure, with confessional journalism and social media barrage, Bayley explores what we might lose as individuals if we let go of the diary as private confidante, choosing instead a culture of public disclosure.