Kathleen Sully, the Vanished Novelist (2022) (opens in new tab)

I'll second this comment. The article is gripping.

Who is bdr?

I actually know Brad (who runs the site) so this is quite a pleasant surprise for me to see it here!

Many years back Yahoo did an experiment with ranking music. They found that every time they ran it, different songs would bubble to the top as "best". From memory, something about early front-runners getting a lock-in.

Edit: found a link https://unbiasx.com/the-yahoo-musiclab-experiment/

>I wonder again to what extent critical acclaim is as random as commercial success.

you can't acclaim what you've never read.

However there are a lot of studies that indicate critical acclaim also seems related to attending the right institutions of higher education, which would indicate a decrease in randomness.

Agatha Christie is not remembered for being a literary darling, but for being a huge commercial and pop-cultural success. She wrote mystery thrillers, and towered over the genre for decades - and still does in many ways. But the quoted bit is specifically about literary insiders, and the boxes that a given writer may or may not fit into. Which may include gender norms.

From reading the article, Sully being neglected by critics may well have been caused in part by her writings falling outside the expectations of both the literary and broad readerships, and neither really knowing what to make of her. Ironically causing her legacy to end up marooned because of the very traits that make the texts interesting.

I think the writer means literary in the narrower sense of 'literary fiction'. Christie was a genre writer; like F/SF etc. I understand that wasn't quite respectable in the upper echelons of the book world. Certainly the reviewers in places like the TLS would be primarily interested in literary fiction.