Cranleigh House

ABN 70310060098

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The business name CRANLEIGH HOUSE was registered in July 2001. It is Mary Wilkie's vehicle for self publishing. Sometime in the mid 1990's Mary completed a novel which she sent out to many publishers, After much waiting and many rejections she put it aside and went on a pilgrimage.

She wrote about that experience under the title “Walking to Santiago- the Diary of a Pilgrimage” and published it to share that story with a wider audience. Following her previous experience with the novel she opted to self-publish the book which was well reviewed . When her stock was exhausted she placed it with www.lulu.com where it still sells to a niche market of intending or returned Santiago pilgrims. More about that under a separate tab.

About a decade on from doing the pilgrimage Mary decided to rework her earlier novel for two reasons. One was simply to finish a task that had been left hanging. The second one was that she felt there was something not quite right in the earlier version that needed to be fixed. So with adding and deleting and the good advice of an experienced editor, Jody Lee, she completed the work and again looked for a publisher. But in the intervening years between her first submission and the present time the publishing industry has changed out of recognition and self publication appeared as the only option.

“Angela of The Angels – the autobiography of a backyard chook” is the second publication by Cranleigh House (or by Mary Wilkie if you prefer). It can be described as a novel about convent life, but all the sisters are chooks. So it is different in many respects from a human's convent though the chooks believe that MaH, the Great Mother Hen, hatched the egg of the Universe and know they are the most superior species in creation. More about this under a separate tab

ABOUT MARY WILKIE

I was a suckling babe when WWII broke out and spent the war years in London. Under wartime rationing you could either get eggs or chook food. We had chooks. They weren't called that in England but they were chooks nonetheless..I started school at the convent of Jesus and Mary in Willesden. (two bus rides from where I lived) At the end of the war the Butler Education Act affected the convent in such a way that the primary section was moved away from the rest of the school (making it three bus rides away) and I was sent to St Augustine's Priory which was within walking distance of home. After twelve years there I went to the London School of Economics and later did graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. I spent many years in the 60's in Latin America- mostly Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. After a brief period at the University of Guelph in Canada I came to Australia in 1973 and settled in Armidale NSW working at the University of New England. The last of my four children was born in Armidale. I retired in 1996 and went for a long walk and did a bit of writing.