Constance Smedley

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Beginning early in the twentieth century, CS published forty books, about twenty of them novels and the rest plays, children's books, and non-fiction including a polemical feminist manifesto and a book of memoirs. Her writing was only one aspect of her career: through her theatrical ideals, teaching, and practice (writing and directing plays and pageants, not all of them published) it connected with her work in the visual arts: embroidery, illustration, and social movements.

Milestones

20 June 1876
CS was born in Trinity Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, the eldest in what became a family of three.
The Feminist Companion and other sources give her birth date erroneously as 1881.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Smedley
1940
The last book that CS published was Peter in Sweden, a novel for children in which a young English boy, sent to stay with Swedish relations, learns how it feels to be a foreigner.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo, http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
9 March 1941
CS died of heart failure at the Old Coaching Inn, 15a High Street, West Wycombe.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Smedley and Armstead

Biography

Birth and Family

20 June 1876
CS was born in Trinity Road, Handsworth, Birmingham, the eldest in what became a family of three.
The Feminist Companion and other sources give her birth date erroneously as 1881.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
under Smedley

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