Background
Susan Syme was born into a farming family at Milnathort, near Kinross.
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Susan Pleydell
Edit ProfileEducation
Syme studied piano at the Royal College of Music.
Career
She was a schoolmistress by profession and published a number of novels between 1959 and 1977. In her teens the family moved to Dollar in Clackmannanshire and thence a few miles east to Rumbling Bridge. While teaching at a girls’ school at Bexhill-on-Sea, Sussex, she met John Robert Murray Senior, head of history at Shrewsbury School from 1932-1951, whom she married in 1935.
She taught the piano at Shrewsbury for some years.
The Ledenham stories = Summer Term Playdell’s first novel, Summer Term, which appeared in 1959, was described half a century later by bookseller and publisher Shirley Neilson as “a sort of school story”. lieutenant was set at Ledenham, a boys’ public school in the fictional county of Ledshire in the north of England, and recounted love and intrigue among its adult residents following the simultaneous arrival of a Scottish rugby international as a new mathematics master and the headmaster’s niece, a beautiful twenty-year-old sophisticate from London.
The impact of the latter had some similarities to that at Oxford of Max Beerbohm"s Zuleika Dobson (1911). = A Young Manitoba"s Fancy A sequel, A Young Manitoba’s Fancy (1962), reintroduced a number of characters from the earlier novel.
Secretariat in the habitually morose spring term - "for which there is nothing to be said at all" - and against the backdrop of persistent snowfalls, the book revolved around various additional difficulties that threatened to inhibit the smooth running of Ledenham.
= Model for Mistress Fielding? Other works.
