Constance Holme

CH , writing during the earlier part of the twentieth century, was a playwright, novelist, short-story writer, and poet. Her plays (her own favourite genre) had little success, but her eight novels and single volume of short pieces (modernist and experimental in style) met with considerable critical respect, though they never broke through to a permanent place in standard accounts of her period. At the same time her novels (all regional in setting, the first three upper-class in their casts of characters) had great popular success with unsophisticated readers, who were apparently won by their intense emotions and (in some cases) exciting stories, ignoring their elements of patterning, their symbolism, and their transformation of individual experience into the more generally human.