Introduction

For nearly half a century, Sylvia Lynd has, at best, been relegated to the footnotes of literary history, where she features mostly as a popular novelist and writer, or as the wife of the slightly less marginalised journalist, Daily News editor and co-founder of the New Statesman, Robert Lynd. Fortunately, a recent awakening of interest in literary networks, cultural hubs and the intermediaries of cultural exchange have enabled her to emerge as a fascinating ‘inter-war middlewoman’ in her own right. Born in London to Irish parents, both committed nationalists, Sylvia Lynd grew up in a stimulating, book-loving and warmly hospitable family, where the central role was played by her mother, Nora Dryhurst, a very independently minded, politically engaged writer, linguist and suffragette. Her father, Alfred Dryhurst, worked at the British Museum. Sylvia was educated at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and at the Slade School of Art, where she became friends with Dorothy Brett and, as both their intellectual circles and their social networks overlapped, with KM and JMM. Beginning their literary careers in the same years and based (some of the time in KM’s case) in the same neighbourhood in Hampstead, the two women found themselves fellow contributors to various newspapers and magazines, working as critics and reviewers. Sylvia’s first novel, The Chorus: A Tale of Love and Folly, was published in 1915; her later fictional writing was warmly received by KM, as the letters below show. Also an evocative, keenly observant poet, Lynd contributed poetry to the Athenaeum, some of which formed part of her collection Goldfinches, published in 1920. She also worked in the publishing industry as a publisher’s reader, experience that would help open up her career in later years when she became a literary adviser in New York and London.

The height of Sylvia Lynd’s career, both individually and in association with her husband, Robert Lynd, came in the 1920s and 1930s, when she worked as part of, and later as chair of, the ‘Prix Femina – Vie Heureuse’,became an active committee member of the English Book Society, alongside Hugh Walpole, and was a loved and influential literary salon hostess, attracting an enviable variety of writers, journalists, publishers, broadcasters and musicians to her Hampstead home at 5 Keats Grove: Rose Macaulay, J. B. Priestley, James Joyce, Mark Gertler and William Gerhardi, to name but a few.