Joan Sutherland

(Joan Collings Kelly)

In This Collection

• Cavanagh of Kultann. New York: Harper, 1911.
• The Edge of the Empire. London: Mills and Boon, 1916.
• Wynnegate Sahib. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918.
• Desborough of the Northwest Frontier. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920.
• Beauty for Ashes. New York: George H. Doran, 1922.
• The Enchanted Country. London: Cassell, 1927.
• Onslaught. London: Cassell, 1927.

‘Sutherland, Joan’, Joan Maisie (Collings) Kelly, 1890-1947, popular novelist and periodical contributor. B. at Bishop’s Stortford, Herts., to Hannah (Walker) and Henry C., journalist, she was educ. at Bournemouth and Leicester schools, and studied singing in Paris. In 1913 she published her first novel, Cavanaugh of Kultana; in 1914 she made her concert debut in Paris, and m. Richard Cecil K. She had five children. She dropped her music, but during a life frequently abroad (Paris, Canada, the USA, and the Orient), she published prolifically (more than 30 novels), often with Mills and Boon, which was already leaning towards stereotypical romances. Despite many exotic Empire settings, affluent and conventional characters, and melodramatic plots, JS depicts genuine problems of female-male relationships, often set in a wider political context. Wings of the Morning, 1919, and In the Midst of the Years, 1933, treat domestic British politics, while Wide Horizon, 1942, and The High Hills, 1948, figure Nazi anti-Semitism in the background. JS’s protagonists often brave society’s disapproval of divorce, and male characters turn to them after disastrous, lust-based marriages; many novels end with hope for mature love.

— The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale UP. 1990. p. 1019.