Dr. Sylvia Dunkley was a member of the Sheffield Hallam Popular Fiction Reading Group from the beginning. Her reviews have often appeared on this blog, and show her no-nonsense style of thinking about what she read. She especially enjoyed novels about social issues – especially those set in the north of England; her reviews often reflected her experience as a Councillor, and her deep knowledge of Sheffield and its history. We are going to miss her at our meetings. This tribute from Chris Hopkins explains how she was recruited to join the group when she was Lord Mayor of Sheffield:
I think it was either Erica Brown or Mary Grover who had the idea of inviting Sylvia, then Lord Mayor of Sheffield, to open the Special Collection of Popular Fiction at Sheffield Hallam’s Adsetts Library sometime in 2012. I am pretty certain that it was at that opening event, with Sylvia resplendent in her chain of office, that I was first introduced to her. I do not remember who asked her if she would like to join the just established monthly reading group in which volunteers from across the city and environs were asked to review once widely read works of fiction from the first half of the twentieth century and to assess what their original appeal might have been and whether it had stood the test of time and changes in style and fashion. I do remember being very pleased that Sylvia immediately said she would be pleased too – despite surely already being very busy with public life.
Sylvia, naturally having said she would take part, took part thoroughly, and rarely missed a meeting, as well as being a prolific writer of the reviews of novels which we published (and continue to publish online on the reading 1900-1950 website. The first review I can find by her dates to August 2012 and is of Michael Arlen’s absolute bestseller of 1924, The Green Hat. After that I can find a further forty-four reviews by her (though I think there may be more than that in total) the last posted February 2024 and about the strangely hypnotic Southern Gothic writer Carson McCullers’ short stories collected under the title The Haunted Boy from 1955. In between over a period of a dozen years came reviews of very varied works of popular fiction, though often Sylvia chose books based in or reflecting on the social history of which see had such a deep knowledge and understanding. Thus in March 2017 Sylvia read and reviewed the sadly not well-remembered Gertrude Colmore’s Suffragette Sally from 1911, while in February 2022 she read Roger Dataller’s novel about a steel works in a fictionalised version of Rotherham titled Steel Saraband (1938). Sylvia’s reviews had a number of qualities: as one reading group member put it recently, they were always ‘forthright’, taking a definite view of the work, its attitudes to politics, freedom and constraint, social and gender attitudes and its representation of the Britain of its time. The Reading Group 1900-1950 will I am sure continue to meet for as long as its members remain keen, and I think we will remember Sylvia as an exemplary reader and writer. If anyone would like to read distinctive voice again, do try searches for ‘Sylvia Dunkley’, ‘Sylvia D’ and just plain ‘Sylvia’ in the search box of this blog.
Sylvia opening the Special Collection in 2012.
Her memorial service will be in Sheffield Cathedral on Monday June 15th, at 10.30.a.m.
Here is Sylvia’s obituary, from the Sheffield Telegraph (Click on it for a better view):
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