Otto Kyllmann

Otto Kyllmann (died 1958) was a publisher and senior director of Constable & Co from 1909 until 1950.

Personal life

Kyllmann's first wife was Victoria Mary Louise Adelaide Cunliffe-Owen, sister of Dame Mary Wills, but they were divorced and she remarried in 1919. His second marriage also ended in divorce.

He enjoyed a close relationship with scholar/writer Helen Waddell,[1] several of whose books were later published by Constable, where Kyllmann had helped Waddell obtain employment.[2]

Professional activities

Besides Waddell, Kyllman's literary protégés included George Bernard Shaw, May Sinclair and Marie Corelli. A collection of Kyllmann's correspondence, dated between 1900 and 1957, is held by Queen's University, Belfast.,[3] having been donated by Waddell's niece after her aunt's death.

It was Kyllmann who, in 1949, rejected a proposal for an edition of George Meredith's poems from Siegfried Sassoon, saying it showed "signs that you were tired and under the weather".[4] When the result was that Sassoon completely abandoned the project, Helen Waddell commented on Sassoon's "anemone-shrinking sensitiveness".

References

  1. ↑ BBC Radio 4, Ulster's Forgotten Darling, broadcast 19 July 2012 (link to podcast)
  2. ↑ Dame Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell: a Life
  3. ↑ Otto Kyllmann Collection
  4. ↑ Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: the Journey from the Trenches, Duckworth, 2003, p358
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