Susan Miles

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SM (who began publishing under her birth name of Ursula Roberts) was a poet and novelist of the earlier twentieth century, who also published a suffrage pamphlet, an admiring biography of her Christian-socialist husband, and a striking verse-novel. Remarkably, her highly imagistic and symbolic prose fiction (set largely in a timeless, primitive countryside) is obscure and occasionally turgid, while her novel in poetry (set largely in London), while still imagistic and symbolic, is crystal-clear and full of the observed detail of daily life. Poems published late in her life represent at least a fair degree of continuity with earlier work, and may even have been written well before they appeared.
She is not to be confused with a spiritualist medium named Ursula Roberts who began publishing shortly before SM ceased to publish, nor with someone else of the same name who produced 75 Years of Moreton Hall, a booklet of girls' school history, in 1998.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

Milestones

16 September 1888

Ursula Wyllie (who later wrote as SM ) was born at Meerut in India.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.

1958

SM published with Linden Press of London her long poem or verse novel Lettice Delmer; it had almost been forgotten when reprinted in 2002 by Persephone .
Miles, Susan. “Disgrace”. The Guardian, p. Review 27.
27

12 May 1975

SM died at her home near Sutton in Bedfordshire, in her later eighties.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.

Biography

Birth and Family

16 September 1888

Ursula Wyllie (who later wrote as SM ) was born at Meerut in India.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.