Margaret Kennedy

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Standard Name: Kennedy, Margaret
Birth Name: Margaret Moore Kennedy
Nickname: Peggy
Married Name: Margaret Moore Davies
Titled: Margaret, Lady Davies
MK achieved international fame early in her writing career with the publication of her novel The Constant Nymph and its subsequent successes on the stage and screen. Though she never attained such high recognition again, she proceeded to write fourteen more novels, many plays and film-scripts, uncollected short stories, two novellas, biography, criticism, part of a personal journal, and one volume of history. Her themes include the importance of art and artists, familial and marital relationships, and the woman's dilemma in balancing personal ambitions with social and domestic duties. She stopped producing once World War Two began, and by the time she resumed publishing in 1950 her writing fame had somewhat dissipated.
Black and white photograph of Margaret Kennedy. She is seated, with her body turned away but her head turned back to face the viewer. Her dark hair is coiled over her ears, and she wears a light dress with lace.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Constance Smedley
With her sister, CS began her education at home with her mother as teacher. She read Shakespeare at four years old, and later learned the violin. She and Ida were concert-goers from an early age...
Friends, Associates Marghanita Laski
ML was a friend of a number of other women writers (besides her fellow Charlotte Yonge enthusiasts Elizabeth Jenkins , Georgina Battiscombe , and Lettice Cooper ), notably Margaret Kennedy (whom her husband published) and Betty Miller .
Friends, Associates Marie Belloc Lowndes
Apart from MBL 's established literary friends, there were many whose early writing she encouraged to particularly good effect: Graham Greene , Margaret Kennedy , Pamela Frankau , E. M. Delafield , and L. P. Hartley .
Elizabeth Northcote, Countess of Iddesleigh, Susan Lowndes Marques, and Marie Belloc Lowndes. “List of Books by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Foreword”. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947, edited by Susan Lowndes Marques and Susan Lowndes Marques, Chatto and Windus, 1971, pp. prelims, 1 - 3.
2
Friends, Associates Anne Ridler
Her brother was working for publishers George Bell , and she met a number of authors, including Antonia White and Margaret Kennedy . Later, through her own work, she met with T. S. Eliot 's...
Intertextuality and Influence Anita Brookner
Its male protagonist—still unusual for Brookner—is an academic, parent of a small daughter. His wife leaves him during the course of the story: though he idealises women, he does not achieve a successful relationship with...
Literary responses Rumer Godden
Though RG 's father had warned that no-one would read a book about nuns, it reached third place in the best-seller charts. By 1987 it had never been out of print.
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan, 1987.
129
Rights were sold...
Literary responses Dorothy L. Sayers
Margaret Kennedy judged that these poems reflected the author's fear of committing herself.
Leonardi, Susan J. Dangerous by Degrees: Women at Oxford and the Somerville College Novelists. Rutgers University Press, 1989.
55
DLS enjoyed herself stirring up theological controversy over this book, persuading her friend Muriel Jaeger to write pseudonymously both for and against it.
Reynolds, Barbara. “"‘Dear Jim…’ The Reconstruction of A Friendship”. Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, Marion E. Wade Center of Wheaton College, pp. 47 -59.
50-1
Textual Production Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ contributed an introduction to a volume, the seventh in John Lehmann 's The Chiltern Library, published in 1947 and containing two titles by Elizabeth Gaskell . In her introduction to Thackeray 's Vanity...
Textual Production Marghanita Laski
Other contributors to the volume included Lettice Cooper , Elizabeth Jenkins , Margaret Kennedy , and Katharine Briggs .
Textual Production Sir J. M. Barrie
SJMB also wrote introductions for and reviews of the work of others. Virginia Woolf reproved him for his high opinion of middle-brow novelist Leonard Merrick , for whom he wrote an introduction in 1918,
Woolf, Virginia. The Essays of Virginia Woolf. McNeillie, Andrew and Stuart Nelson ClarkeEditors , Hogarth Press, 2011.
2: 265ff
Textual Production Anita Brookner
In the early 1980s AB did a good deal of reviewing of literary works for the Times Literary Supplement.
Skinner, John. The Fictions of Anita Brookner: Illusions of Romance. Macmillan, 1992.
9-11
In 1988 she edited her own selection, with introduction, of The Stories of Edith Wharton
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Ella Hepworth Dixon
In a chapter devoted to Some Women Writers she praises, among others, Sheila Kaye-Smith , Margaret Kennedy (particularly for The Constant Nymph), Elizabeth von Arnim , and Violet Hunt . Authors who receive whole...

Timeline

1929
The young actor John Gielgud , after success in the West End (dating from his role in the stage version of Margaret Kennedy 's The Constant Nymph in 1926), took a cut in income to...