Dorothea Walker

SKS made early friendships with the novelists G. B. Stern and Walter Lionel George .

In about 1984 the Scottish National Portrait Gallery asked MS to sit for her portrait for their collection, by Sandy Moffat . Of the resulting painting MS says: I was just a model for The...

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.

This novel brought critical and popular acclaim. SKS said that the weeks following its appearance were some of the happiest of her life. The Times Literary Supplement notice began: No matter what fine work...

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...

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. The novel has been much admired by critics. Four...

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...

This was, however, one of her less successful novels, both in terms of reviews and of sales.Dorothea Walker puts this down to the public's wish to be distracted from thinking about the war.

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.