Emma Smith (author)

Emma Smith (born 21 August 1923) is an English novelist, who has also written for children and published two volumes of autobiography.

Born as Elspeth Hallsmith in Cornwall, she was educated privately up to the age of 16, when she decided to take up a job at the War Office. During the Second World War, she volunteered to work on the canals as a boatwoman. Later on, her experiences as a trainee boatwoman on the Grand Union Canal would become the basis for her debut novel, Maidens' Trip.

In September 1946, Smith, still only 23, went off to India with a team of documentary film-makers that included the poet Laurie Lee, who served as the scriptwriter on the team. During the trip, Cider with Rosie, Lee's classic account of growing up in rural Gloucestershire, was in its embryonic stages. Emma Smith was one of those who would later encourage Lee to complete what became one of the best loved accounts of childhood in English literature.

After nine months in India, Smith returned to England in 1947 and set down to write her first book. Maidens' Trip (1948) proved to be a critical and a commercial success and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. With the proceeds from it, she moved to Paris, where she took a room in the Hotel de Tournon and, drawing on her memories of India, typed up her second novel.

The Far Cry was published in 1949 to even greater acclaim and was republished in 2002 by Persephone Books. The tale of a young English girl and her cantankerous father travelling together through India, it was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1949, and later reissued in a Penguin edition.

In 1951, Smith married. Within the next six years, she became the mother of two children, and then suddenly a widow. Finding herself a single mother, she moved to Radnorshire in rural Wales to raise her children. Her writing now took a back seat to her family duties.

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