Wednesday, December 30, 2015

Kenneth Gunnell

Kenneth Gunnell (b. Hove, Sussex, 17 February 1918; d. reg. Truro, Cornwall, May 2001)

Kenneth George P. Gunnell was the son and only child of George Thomas Gunnell (1887-1968).  In the literary world he is primarily remembered as the translator of Bernard Sellin's The Life and Works of David Lindsay (Cambridge University Press, 1981).  Gunnell had in fact known Lindsay in Hove during the last seven years of Lindsay's life, beginning in the summer of 1938, and his brief translator's preface adds some nice details of  Lindsay's final years.

Gunnell's only other known publications are of a very different sort: two novels that were both published by Luxor Press of London, though the first book had a successful American edition under the Phoenix Library imprint of Grove Press. The Graduate Mistress (1971) is a sexy tale of a schoolmistress dominating one of her young male students.  In the second, The School for Sin (1973), a young man relates his sexual adventures as a teacher at a boarding school for girls. These books are in style about as far away from David Lindsay as you can get.