Sheila Kaye-Smith

• 1. Introduction

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  Sheila Kaye-Smith was born on the 4th of February 1887 in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex. She spent most of her life in that county, writing novels rooted so deeply in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent that the landscape itself became almost a character. Her 1923 book The End of the House of Alard became a best-seller, and brought her international recognition at a time when few women writers commanded worldwide sales. The questions her life raises are worth sitting with: how does a writer build a career from the rhythms of rural England? How does religious conversion reshape an artistic vision? And what does it mean when the very genre you helped define turns around and laughs at itself?

• 2. Roots in Rural Sussex

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  Kaye-Smith was the daughter of a physician, and she grew up in Sussex at a time when the county still bore the marks of the nineteenth-century agricultural depression. Her fiction returned again and again to the details of farming, land rents, legacies, and the effects of industrialisation on provincial life. Critics and scholars noted her descriptions of farming practices, village vernacular, and the economics of rural existence as particularly detailed and accurate for the genre.

  Her heroines are frequently single parents, and most navigate gender-related trials that reflect her early feminist outlook. Writers including George Moore and Thomas Hardy shaped her sensibility, and she found herself grouped with rural novelists such as Mary E. Mann, Mary Webb, and Thomas Hardy himself. That company was prestigious, but it also invited parody. When Stella Gibbons published Cold Comfort Farm in 1932, she was in part lampooning the entire earthy rural tradition to which Kaye-Smith belonged.

  Kaye-Smith's response to that parody reveals a good-humoured self-awareness. In her 1939 novel A Valiant Woman, set in a village undergoing rapid modernisation, she planted a playful riposte. A character's grandmother picks up a book called Cold Comfort Farm and declares: "There was nothing written nowadays worth reading." The grandmother complains that the author knows nothing about country life, unwittingly becoming the very narrow-minded reader Gibbons had satirised. The fact that Kaye-Smith could place herself on both sides of that joke says something about the range of her intelligence.

• 3. Joanna Godden and the Screen

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  Joanna Godden, published in 1921, is set in Romney Marsh and is widely regarded as Kaye-Smith's most famous novel. Its central character is a woman navigating the particular challenges of farming and independence in a landscape that feels both beautiful and unforgiving. The book secured her reputation as a serious novelist of rural life.

  More than two decades after publication, the story reached a wider audience through a film adaptation released in 1947 as The Loves of Joanna Godden, starring Googie Withers. The score was composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and the screenplay was written by H. E. Bates. That screenplay, however, arrived at a markedly different conclusion from the one Kaye-Smith had written. The gap between the novel's ending and the film's ending is a reminder of how adaptation can remake a story's meaning.

  The film's release renewed interest in the original novel, and in the 1980s both Joanna Godden and Susan Spray were reissued by Virago, the feminist publishing house. That reissue placed Kaye-Smith's work in a new critical context, alongside writers being recovered by the women's press movement. By that point her books had fallen out of regular print, though they remained available through the used book trade.

• 4. Faith and Conversion

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  In 1924 Kaye-Smith married Theodore Penrose Fry, an Anglican clergyman. The following year she published a book on Anglo-Catholicism, signalling a deepening religious preoccupation that would come to mark her later fiction. By 1929 both she and her husband had converted to the Roman Catholic Church.

  The conversion carried practical consequences. Penrose Fry had to give up his Anglican curacy, and the two of them moved to Northiam in Sussex, settling into a large converted oast house. After noting that they and some of their neighbours had no nearby church, they bought land and established a Catholic chapel dedicated to St Theresa of Lisieux at Northiam. That chapel still holds a large congregation, and Kaye-Smith is buried in the churchyard there.

  The house they built their life around, Little Doucegrove, passed after them into the ownership of novelist Rumer Godden, another writer who had converted to Catholicism. The religious themes that entered Kaye-Smith's life at Northiam entered her writing too. Her later novels placed characters in the middle of spiritual crises and traced the subtle doctrinal distances among Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, and Catholicism. Books such as The Lardners and the Laurelwoods, A Valiant Woman, and Mrs Gailey explored women's anxieties about social class, divorce, and changing roles against a backdrop of rural life being pressed by modernity.

• 5. Friendships and Collaborations

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  G. B. Stern was among the admirers of Kaye-Smith's work, and the two women became close friends. That friendship produced an unusual form of literary collaboration: together they wrote two books examining the lives and work of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Noel Coward. The pairing of Austen and Hardy alongside Coward is a striking combination, spanning drawing-room comedy and rural tragedy in one critical project.

  Kaye-Smith also wrote journalism that appeared in national journals, magazines, and newspapers, extending her reach well beyond the novel-reading public. Her prose was noted for its similarities to contemporaries including Barbara Pym, Marghanita Laski, and H. E. Bates, writers who shared her interest in the social pressures bearing down on women in middle-brow fiction of the pre- and post-Second World War period. A distant family connection linked her to M. M. Kaye, the author of The Far Pavilions, though that tie was remote.

  The Sheila Kaye-Smith literary society is based in St Leonards-on-Sea, the town where she was born, and continues to meet regularly. It has published a chronology of her life and works and produces an annual journal called The Gleam. Extensive archives relating to Kaye-Smith are held at West Sussex County Library in Chichester, and in June 2017 Country Books published a new biography by Shaun Cooper titled The Shining Cord.