Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Sheila Kaye-Smith
-
Standard Name: Kaye-Smith, Sheila
Birth Name: Sheila Kaye-Smith
Married Name: Sheila Fry
Pseudonym: E. C. Ticehurst
Writing mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, SKS
published thirty-one novels, in addition to about twenty works in other genres: biography, criticism, saints' lives, country lore, and books of memoirs (one of them disguised as a cookery book). Almost all her novels are set in the Weald of Sussex, with which her name became closely identified. She called Jane Austen
her Bible.
"Sheila Kaye-Smith" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Sheila_Kaye-Smith_-_Oct_1922_Harpers.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
She spent her first Christmas as a Catholic with Sheila Kaye-Smith
and her husband, T. Penrose Fry
, and attended Midnight Mass in the church they had built in their fields, with German prisoners of...
One of GBS
's close friends was Sheila Kaye-Smith
, with whom she collaborated in works about Jane Austen
. Another was Noël Coward
, who met her after sending her a fan letter, introduced...
Instructor
Noel Streatfeild
Noel's first school, attended as a day-girl, was Hastings and St Leonard's Ladies' College in St Leonards-on-Sea. One of her teachers there was Sheila Kaye-Smith
.
Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
There Noel first made her mark as a...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna Lyall
In 1912 Virginia Woolf
, reviewing a book about Dickens, remarked how in country inns on a wet weekend the walker frustrated by the weather would find on the single bookshelf just two authors: Dickens
Intertextuality and Influence
Dora Russell
DR
first saw a tamarisk tree as a young girl. This tree grows in Britain, especially near the southern coasts (Sheila Kaye-Smith
had used it for local associations in her title Tamarisk Town...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The idea for the novel germinated while SG
was working at the Evening Standard; she wrote much of it while travelling to and from work on the London tube.
Briggs, Asa. A History of Longmans and Their Books 1724 - 1990. Longevity in Publishing. British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2008.
390
In 1928, the year...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
Such earthy regionalists—who include Thomas Hardy
and D. H. Lawrence
, as well as Webb
and Kaye-Smith
—become the butt of SG
's satire in Cold Comfort Farm.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury, 1998.
A later novelist, Sheila Kaye-Smith
, wrote that as a child she had known this novel and To Right the Wrong almost by heart.
Kaye-Smith, Sheila, and G. B. Stern. Talking of Jane Austen. Cassell, 1943.
1
Literary responses
Edna Lyall
Like In the Golden Days (also set in the seventeenth century), this book was a favourite of the young Sheila Kaye-Smith
.
Kaye-Smith, Sheila, and G. B. Stern. Talking of Jane Austen. Cassell, 1943.
1
Literary responses
Amber Reeves
After the appearance of her first three novels, two critics gave AR
a significant place in accounts of the current state of fiction. R. Brimley Johnson
characterised her as a sex-explorer, free from either...
Literary responses
Stella Benson
Forty-six years after Benson's death, Naomi Mitchison
acknowledged that her work had ceased being read, that her fantasy was misunderstood as whimsy. She felt, however, that in 1979 a revival was due.
Mitchison, Naomi. You May Well Ask: A Memoir 1920-1940. Gollancz, 1979.
127
It is...
Literary responses
Theodora Benson
Sheila Kaye-Smith
reviewed this in the Sunday Express as a charmingly written book.
Benson, Theodora, and Betty Askwith. Seven Basketfuls. Victor Gollancz, 1932.
