, Gloucestershire, England Michael Sadleir was born in
Oxford, England, the son of
Sir Michael Ernest Sadler and Mary Sadler. He adopted the older variant of his surname to differentiate himself from his father, a historian, educationist, and
Vice-Chancellor of the
University of Leeds. Sadleir was initially taught by
Eva Gilpin in Ilkley before he was educated at
Rugby School and was a contemporary of
Rupert Brooke, with whom he was romantically involved, and
Geoffrey Keynes. Sadleir then attended
Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history and won the 1912
Stanhope essay prize on the political career of
Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Before the
First World War, Sadleir and his father were keen collectors of art, and purchased works by young English artists such as
Stanley Spencer and
Mark Gertler. They were amongst the first collectors (and certainly the first English collectors) of the paintings of the Russian-born
German Expressionist artist
Wassily Kandinsky. In 1913, both Sadleir and his father travelled to Germany to meet Kandinsky in
Munich. This visit led to Sadleir translating into English Kandinsky's seminal written work on
expressionism,
Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1914. This was one of the first coherent arguments for
abstract art in the English language and the translation by Sadleir was seen as both crucial to understanding Kandinsky's theories about abstract art and as a key text in the history of
modernism. Extracts from it were published in the
Vorticist literary magazine BLAST in 1914, and it remained one of the most influential art texts of the first decades of the twentieth century. Sadleir began to work for the publishing firm of
Constable & Co. in 1912, becoming a director in 1920, In 1920 as editor of
Bliss and Other Stories by
Katherine Mansfield for Constable he insisted on censoring sections of her short story
Je ne parle pas français which show the cynical attitudes to love and sex of the narrator. Her husband
John Middleton Murry persuaded Sadleir to reduce the cuts slightly (Murry and Sadleir had founded the
avant-garde quarterly
Rhythm in 1912). After the end of World War I, he served as a British delegate to the
Paris Peace Conference, 1919, and worked at the secretariat of the newly formed
League of Nations. As a literary historian, he specialised in 19th-century English fiction, notably the work of
Anthony Trollope. Together with
Ian Fleming and others, Sadleir was a director and contributor to
The Book Handbook, later renamed
The Book Collector, published by
Queen Anne Press. He also conducted research on
Gothic fiction and discovered rare original editions of the
Northanger Horrid Novels mentioned in the novel
Northanger Abbey by
Jane Austen. Beforehand, some of these books, with their lurid titles, were thought to be figments of Austen's imagination. Sadleir and
Montague Summers demonstrated that they did really exist. In 1937, he was the
Sandars Reader in Bibliography at
Cambridge University, on the subject of the "Bibliographical Aspects of the Victorian Novel". He was President of the
Bibliographical Society from 1944 to 1946. Sadleir's best-known novel was
Fanny by Gaslight (1940), a fictional exploration of prostitution in
Victorian London. It was
adapted under that name as a
1944 film. The 1947 novel
Forlorn Sunset further explored the characters of the
Victorian London underworld. His writings also include a biography of his father, published in 1949, and a privately published memoir of one of his sons, who was killed in World War II. The remarkable collection of
Victorian fiction compiled by Sadleir, now at the
UCLA Department of Special Collections, is the subject of a catalogue published in 1951. His collection of
Gothic fiction is at the University of Virginia
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Sadleir lived at Througham Court,
Bisley, in
Gloucestershire, a fine
Jacobean farmhouse altered for him by the architect
Norman Jewson, c. 1929. He sold Througham Court in 1949 and moved to Willow Farm,
Oakley Green, in
Berkshire. ==Bibliography==