Pond Life by Sally Bayley

Sunday February 14 2027 6pm, £10/5

A talk about her new book, & about how to write and find inspiration.

In a digital age, Pond Life asks who will record the lives that do not appear on screen. Enter Edith Cull, unmarried and working as an occasional cover teacher. Edith's life lacks biography. Her chief pleasure and source of excitement is the cinema. Encouraged by on-screen fantasies, Edith attaches herself to the local chemist, the stalwart Mr. Jarvis. In the same town lives Dorothy Fortescue married to the noble Henry. Behind her manor walls, Dorothy lives out another form of spectral existence. As lady of the manor, Dorothy summons 'Pond Man' who arrives to build her a garden pond; and upon the surface of her pond Dorothy projects the all the scenery of her boredom and grief. The lives of these two women reflect and illuminate one another and in a crucial moment of misreading their lives intertwine...

Sally Bayley

Sally Bayley is a fiction and non-fiction writer who lives on a narrowboat on the River Thames in Oxford. Sally is currently a Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. She also teaches on the Sarah Lawrence visiting programme at Wadham College, Oxford.