Dick, Kay
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author, Editor.
Working name of UK editor and author Kathleen Elsie Dick (1915-2001). She edited The Windmill (1946-1948), a literary magazine, as by Edward Lane; and published three anthologies as by Jeremy Scott, the second of them, At Close of Eve: An Anthology of New Curious Stories (anth 1947), being an Original Anthology of some interest. A late work, They: A Sequence of Unease (fixup 1977 chap), resembles thematically and in its experimental structure much of her previous fiction, but is set in a Dystopian Near-Future England where freedom of travel is restricted and cultural activities are actively persecuted. Constructed as a set of closely interlinked stories that mirror one another through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, They describes an Entropic tyranny which sanctions a youth-culture whose yobbish behaviour saps creative values (and middle-class individualism); in relating these levels of meaning, Dick sets up a very moving, though abstract, model of humanistic response to a straitened future. The restrictions on expressive or creative behaviour in Howard Jacobson's J (2014) may reflect Dick's direct influence. Pierrot (1960) is a nonfiction study of its title theme [for Commedia dell'Arte see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. [JC]
Kathleen Elsie Dick
born London: 29 July 1915
died Brighton, Sussex: 19 October 2001
works (selected)
- They: A Sequence of Unease (London: Allen Lane, 1977) [fixup: chap: hb/Ivan Holmes]
nonfiction
- Pierrot (London: Hutchinson, 1960) [nonfiction: hb/from Pablo Picasso]
works as editor
- The Mandrake Root: An Anthology of Fantastic Tales (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1946) as by Jeremy Scott [anth: hb/uncredited]
- At Close of Eve: An Anthology of New Curious Stories (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1947) as by Jeremy Scott [anth: hb/Frederick T W Cook]
- The Uncertain Element: An Anthology of Fantastic Conceptions (London: Jarrolds Publishers, 1950) as by Jeremy Scott [anth: hb/]
links
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: Commedia dell'Arte
- Picture Gallery
previous versions of this entry