The Times Literary Supplement notice began: No matter what fine work...
Literary responses
Sheila Kaye-Smith
This was the favourite novel of SKS
herself, and of critics Margaret MacKenzie
and George Moore
. On 25 July 1928 Moore inscribed to Kaye-Smith a copy of his Memoirs of my Dead Life...
Literary responses
Sheila Kaye-Smith
W. L. George
did not care for the finished form of the heroine he had suggested: he found her a too much of a virago.
qtd. in
Anderson, Rachel, and Sheila Kaye-Smith. “Introduction”. Joanna Godden, Dial, 1984, p. xi - xviii.
xv
The novel has been much admired by critics. Four...
Literary responses
Sheila Kaye-Smith
G. B. Stern
felt that among SKS
's postwar novels, this one and the next, The View from the Parsonage, 1954, are even superior to her earlier books in humor, shrewdness and mental breadth...
Critics, wrote her friend G. B. Stern
years later, took her writing to be masculine in its picaresque gusto and boldness. Some enjoyed this tendency in her first novel, but some were shocked.
Stern, G. B. . And did he stop and speak to you?. Henry Regnery, 1958.
SKS
published another Sussex novel to a scheme suggested by Walter Lionel George
, the choice of a woman instead of a man as protagonist: Joanna Godden.
At this point biographer Dorothea Walker
attaches...