The Shelf

After being educated in Geneva and London, Kay Dick (1915-2001) found herself mixing with a “louche set” that included Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, and Muriel Spark. At the age of twenty-six, she became the first female director of an English publishing house, and from the 1940s through the ’60s, she and her long-term partner, the novelist Kathleen Farrell, were at the heart of the London literary scene. She published seven novels—including They, which is also published by McNally Editions—a study of the commedia dell’arte, and two volumes of literary interviews.