Sally Bayley WORM IN THE BUD with Elisabeth Gray

Worm in the Bud

Lilian Blackwood is a sixteen year old girl who longs to be powerful.

But the strict Victorian world she has been raised in does not allow girls to express themselves, and her desire to be noticed gets the better of her when she meets with the handsome Mr Tilney and his manservant, Carpenter.

Set against the backdrop of Victorian England and the British Empire this is a fable of innocence unchallenged by experience and a comment on the ambiguities of love, sex and history.

Author Sally Bayley will discuss her recently published novella, Worm in the Bud: A Fable (The New Menard Press): a sexual coming of age story set against the backdrop of a repressed Victorian society and the financial machinations of the British Empire. Theatrical, lyrical and inventive, Sally’s fable asks whether innocence is possible in a world already so determined by class and socio-economic status.

Sally will be accompanied by award winning actress Elisabeth Gray who will perform uniquely dramatised extracts from Sally’s novel.

Sally Bayley

Sally Bayley is the author of a series of ground-breaking books which defy category and genre. All explore the relationship between biography, autobiography and fiction through myth, fable, fairytale and forms of lyrical and visual memory. Published works include her three-part coming-of-age sequence, Girl with Dove, No Boys Play Here and The Green Lady (William Collins) and a study of the diary as an art form, The Private Life of the Diary (William Collins). Her forthcoming book, Pond Life, will also be published with The New Menard Press, September 2026.

Elisabeth Gray

"The talented writer and actress Elisabeth Gray" (The New Yorker) has collaborated with Sally Bayley on many projects, including the Fringe First winning play *Wish I Had a Sylvia Plath* and the literary quilt *I'm Nobody* intersecting the works of Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, and Shakespeare's Hamlet."

Event Venue

Blackwell's Bookshop, 48-51 Broad Street, Oxford, United Kingdom

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