Short answers, pulled from the story.
Sheila Kaye-Smith is best known for her 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 brought her worldwide recognition. Joanna Godden (1921), set in Romney Marsh, is widely regarded as her most famous novel.
Sheila Kaye-Smith was born on the 4th of February 1887 in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex. She lived most of her life in Sussex and died on the 14th of January 1956.
The film adaptation was released in 1947 as The Loves of Joanna Godden, starring Googie Withers. The screenplay was written by H. E. Bates and the score was composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The film ends differently from Kaye-Smith's original novel.
Yes. By 1929, Sheila Kaye-Smith and her husband Theodore Penrose Fry had both converted to the Roman Catholic Church. After the conversion, they moved to Northiam in Sussex and established a Catholic chapel dedicated to St Theresa of Lisieux, where Kaye-Smith is buried.
Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons was in part a parody of the earthy rural novel tradition to which Kaye-Smith belonged. Kaye-Smith responded with good humour, placing a playful riposte in her 1939 novel A Valiant Woman that featured a character dismissing Cold Comfort Farm as unrealistic.
Joanna Godden and Susan Spray were reissued by Virago, the feminist publishing house, in the 1980s. The reissue followed renewed interest in Joanna Godden sparked by the 1947 film adaptation. Since the Virago reissues, her books have gone out of print but remain available on the used book market.