Salley Vickers (born 1948) is a British novelist whose works include Miss Garnet's Angel, Mr. Golightly's Holiday, The Other Side of You and Where Three Roads Meet, a retelling of the Oedipus myth to Sigmund Freud in the last months of his life.
[2] Her mother Freddie, a social worker, and her father, J. O. N. Vickers, a trades union leader, were both members of the Communist Party of Great Britain until 1956.
[citation needed] She won a state scholarship to St Paul's Girls' School, which caused her father some ideological consternation but her mother was supportive.
[citation needed] She also taught English literature at Stanford, Oxford and the Open University, specialising in Shakespeare, the 19th-century novel and 20th-century poetry.
Recent novels include The Cleaner of Chartres (2012), which considers the plight of unmarried mothers whose children are taken from them; Cousins (2016), which explores the moral dilemmas of assisted suicide, a cause to which Vickers has put her name; The Librarian (2018), which includes biographical information in the author's notes; Grandmothers (2019), which is based on her work as a psychotherapist and which explores intergenerational relationships; and The Gardener, which was published in November 2021.
[9] In April 2020 she wrote that she hoped to be infected by the COVID-19 virus 'in order to be granted the immunity to return to the world and lend a hand'.