Sheila Kaye-Smith
| Sheila Kaye-Smith | |
|---|---|
Kaye-Smith in 1922
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| Born |
4 February 1887 St Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, England |
| Died | 14 January 1956 (aged 68) Northiam, Sussex, England |
| Nationality | English |
| Occupation | Novelist and poet |
Sheila Kaye-Smith (4 February 1887 – 14 January 1956) was an English writer, known for her many novels set in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent in the English regional tradition. Her 1923 book The End of the House of Alard became a best-seller, and gave her prominence; it was followed by other successes and her books enjoyed worldwide sales.
The daughter of a physician, Sheila was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex, and lived most of her life in that county, apart from a period in London in her youth. She was a distant relative of writer M. M. Kaye (The Far Pavilions).
In 1924 she married Theodore Penrose Fry, an Anglican clergyman, and in 1925 wrote a book on Anglo-Catholicism. By 1929 she and her husband had converted to the Roman Catholic Church. Penrose Fry therefore had to give up his Anglican curacy, and they moved to Northiam in Sussex, where they lived in a large converted oast house. Soon afterwards, having noted their own and some of their neighbours' need for a nearby church, they bought land on which they established a Catholic chapel dedicated to St Theresa of Lisieux, at Northiam, which still enjoys a large congregation. Sheila is buried in the churchyard there. Their house, Little Doucegrove, was later owned by novelist Rumer Godden, another female Catholic convert novelist.
Kaye-Smith's fiction was noted for being rooted in rural concerns: the nineteenth century agricultural depression, farming, legacies, land rents, strikes, the changing position of women, the effects of industrialisation on the countryside and provincial life. Admirers of her work included her close friend G. B. Stern (with whom she collaborated on two books about Jane Austen), Thomas Hardy, and Noël Coward.
Kaye-Smith's novels straddle more than one genre of fiction. Her earliest novels partly fit into the 'earthy' rural category, together with that of Mary E Mann, Mary Webb, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy, a genre which inspired Stella Gibbons's parody Cold Comfort Farm. Kaye-Smith gets her own back with a tongue-in-cheek reference to Cold Comfort Farm in A Valiant Woman (1939), set in a rapidly modernising village. In a subplot, upper middle-class teenager, Lucia, turns from writing twee rural poems to the great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about the Means Test." Her philistine grandmother is dismayed as she prefers cosy rural novels, and knows Lucia is ignorant of proletarian life:
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