Sheila Kaye-Smith
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Sheila Kaye-Smith (4 February 1887 – January 14, 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 world-wide sales. Her novel Joanna Godden based in Romney Marsh was filmed in 1947 as The Loves of Joanna Godden starring Googie Withers and with a score by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The screenplay by H. E. Bates has a very different conclusion to the story.
The daughter of a doctor, Sheila was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex, and lived most of her life in that county. She was a distant relative of writer M M Kaye (The Far Pavilions).
Her fiction was noted for being rooted in rural concerns: farming, legacies, land rents, the changing position of women, the effects of industrialisation on the countryside and provincial life, and latterly her religious preoccupations. Admirers of her work included her close friend G. B. Stern (with whom she collaborated on two books about Jane Austen), Thomas Hardy, and Noel Coward.
Some of her novels fit into the earthy rural genre of fiction, together with that of Mary Webb, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy, partly inspiring the parody "Cold Comfort Farm" by Stella Gibbons. Kaye-Smith also produced many short stories published in national journals, magazines and newspapers.
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 Roman Catholicism. Penrose Fry therefore had to give up his Anglican curacy, and they moved to Northiam in Sussex, where they lived in a huge converted oast house. Soon afterwards, having noted their own and some of their neighbours need for a nearby Catholic church, they bought land on which they established a Catholic chapel, St Teresa 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.
The novels Joanna Godden and Susan Spray were reissued in the 1980s by feminist publishing house Virago. Her books are now out of print, but are easily available from the used book market. The Sheila Kaye-Smith literary society is based in St Leonards-on-Sea, meets regularly, and has published a chronology of her life and works, as well producing an annual journal, The Gleam. There are extensive archives relating to Sheila Kaye-Smith in West Sussex County Library in Chichester.
[edit] Works
- The Tramping Methodist (1908)
- Spell Land: The Story of a Sussex Farm (1910)
- Samuel Richardson (1911)
- Isle of Thorns (1913)
- Willow's Forge and other poems (1914)
- Three against the World (1914)
- Sussex Gorse (1916)
- John Galsworthy (1916) biography
- The Challenge to Sirius (1917)
- Little England (1918)
- Tamarisk Town (1919)
- Green Apple Harvest (1920)
- Joanna Godden (1921)
- Saints in Sussex (1923) poems
- The End of the House of Alard (1923)
- Starbrace (1923)
- Anglo-Catholicism (1925)
- The George and the Crown (1925)
- The Mirror of the Months (1925)
- Joanna Godden Married and other Stories (1926)
- Iron and Smoke (1928)
- A Wedding Morn (1928)
- The Village Doctor (1929)
- Shepherds in Sackcloth (1930)
- Songs Late and Early (1931) poems
- Susan Spray (1931)
- The Children's Summer (1932)
- The Ploughman's Progress (1933)
- Superstition Corner (1934)
- Gallybird (1934)
- Selina is Older (1935)
- Rose Deeprose (1936)
- Three Ways Home (1937) autobiography
- Faithful Stranger and Other Stories (1938) short stories
- The Valiant Woman (1939)
- Ember Lane (1940)
- Tambourine, Trumpet and Drum (1943)
- Talking of Jane Austen (1943) with G. B. Stern
- Kitchen Fugue (1945)
- The Lardners and the Laurelwoods (1948)
- The Happy Tree (1949)
- The Treasures of the Snow (1949)
- More Talk of Jane Austen (1950) with G. B. Stern
- Mrs. Gailey (1951)
- The Hidden Son (1953)
- The Weald of Kent and Sussex (1953) topography
- Quartet in Heaven (1953) religious biography
- The View from the Parsonage (1954)
- All the Books of My Life (1956) autobiography
[edit] References
- Sheila Kaye-Smith and the Weald Country (1925) R. Thurston Hopkins
- Sheila Kaye-Smith Letters, 1909-1937 by Sheila Kaye-Smith & Sewell Stokes.
- Sheila Kaye-Smith (1980) Dorothea Walker
- A Chronology of the Life and Works of Sheila Kaye-Smith Third edition (2005) Michael Bristow-Smith. (Published by the Sheila Kaye-Smith Society.)
