Solitaire

by Kay Dick

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Dick was born Kathleen Elsie Dick at Queen Charlotte's Hospital, London, England, UK, but was but raised in Switzerland by her mother, Kate Frances Dick, being educated in Geneva, as well as at the Lycée Français in London. In early life, Kay Dick worked at Foyle's bookshop in London's Charing Cross Road and, at 26, became the first woman director in English publishing at P.S. King & Son. She later became a journalist, working at the New Statesman. For many years, she edited the literary magazine The Windmill, under the nom de plume Edward Lane.

Dick wrote five novels between 1949 and 1962, including the famous An Affair of Love (1953) and Solitaire (1958). She also wrote literary biography, researching the lives of Colette and Carlyle. In 1960 she published Pierrot, about the commedia dell'arte.

Dick was a regular reviewer for The Times, The Spectator and Punch. Dick also edited several anthologies of stories and interviews with writers, including Ivy and Stevie (1971) and Friends and Friendship (1974). She was known for campaigning tirelessly and successfully for the introduction of the Public Lending Right, which pays royalties to authors when their books are borrowed from public libraries.

In 1977, Dick published They, a series of dream sequences that won the South-East Arts literature prize, and was described in The Paris Review in 2020 as "a lost dystopian masterpiece". It had remained out of print due to poor sales and Kay experiencing harsh and sexist reviews in the press at the time of the award win. "They" was re-discovered by chance in a Oxfam charity bookshop in Bath, UK in the summer of 2020 by a literary agent. It was then acquired by Faber and Faber for re-release on February 3rd 2022 in the UK. In 1984 she followed the publication of "They" with an acclaimed autobiographical novel, The Shelf, in which she examined a lesbian affair.

Dick lived for some two decades with the novelist Kathleen Farrell, from 1940 to 1962.

Reviews

[Ariadne Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kay Dick is a fascinating character to read about, not perhaps so much to come across socially. In 'Solitaire', the craft of writing is an overt preoccupation: the narrator, a female writer, comes to Paris to do a magazine piece, instead begins a book based on her local encounters, and in between writing and dining reflects on the relationship of text to the ‘real life’ that it purports to reflect. It’s an interesting book which I wanted to like more than I actually did. Dick writes in an elegant, sophisticated, amusing manner that I easily respond too. The problem is that, on the evidence of this book, she doesn’t have much flair for character: all the people here are rather uninteresting and even mildly unattractive. Secondly, nothing much of interest happens, and the dialogue seems to have little depth beyond the superficial polish. (When I say depth, I don’t mean profundity, but rather layers of subtlety in conveying more than is said and in implying character.)

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