Margaret Kennedy
| Margaret Kennedy | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
23 April 1896 Hyde Park Gate, London, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | 31 July 1967 (aged 71) United Kingdom |
Margaret Kennedy (23 April 1896 – 31 July 1967) was an English novelist and playwright. Her most successful work, as a novel and as a play, was The Constant Nymph.
Margaret Kennedy was born in Hyde Park Gate, London, the eldest of the four children of Charles Moore Kennedy (1857-1934), a barrister, and his wife Ellinor Edith Marwood (1861–1928). The novelist Joyce Cary was a cousin on her father's side.
She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College, where she began writing, and then went up to Somerville College, Oxford in 1915 to read history. Other literary contemporaries at Somerville College included Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, Hilda Reid, Naomi Mitchison and Sylvia Thompson. Her first publication was a history book, A Century of Revolution (1922). Margaret Kennedy was married on 20 June 1925 to the barrister David Davies (1889–1964), who later became a county court judge and a national insurance commissioner. He was knighted in 1952. They had a son and two daughters, one of whom was the novelist Julia Birley. The novelist Serena Mackesy is her granddaughter. Margaret Kennedy died at a friend's house at Adderbury, Oxfordshire on 31 July 1967.
Margaret Kennedy is best appreciated today for her second novel, The Constant Nymph, which she adapted into a highly successful West End play that opened at the New Theatre, with Noël Coward and Edna Best in September 1926. Coward was replaced by John Gielgud during the run. It was also successfully filmed in 1928 by Adrian Brunel and Alma Reville, directed by Brunel and Basil Dean, and starring Ivor Novello, Mabel Poulton and Benita Hume, and again in 1933, 1938 (for television), and 1943.
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