Sheila Kaye Smith

Sheila Kaye Smith was born in to a middle class family, conventional, and respectable in Sussex in 1887.  Like most girls of the time, she did the social round and was expected to have no other career but marriage and motherhood.  However, she was a shy rather intense young girl and had ambitions that were unusual.  Her father, a doctor, wanted her to go to university, because he felt that her intelligence deserved training.  Middle class girls were beginning to go to college, and occasionally to start earning their own livings. This probably came as a relief for some middle class professional fathers, who would have less need to provide some kind of income for their daughters, should they not marry.

Sheila wrote later that while she fell in love at times, she had no real desire to marry, although her parents were very happily married.  She liked the idea of being able to live and work as she chose. She began to write for publication after leaving school and had a modest success. Her books were set in rural Sussex, where she lived most of her life, and were often about farming and working people.  Some were set in the Victorian era and others in her own time, but she was admired as a rural novelist who was capable of writing accurately and interestingly about Sussex farming people. Her novels began to sell well and she was making a comfortable living from her writing.

She also was interested in religion and studied the subject, for many years. She read up on different philosophies and then became devoted to the High Anglican wing of the Church of England.   In 1924, married Theodore Penrose Fry, an Anglican clergyman.  They had no children.

Later, however she and he were received into the Roman Catholic Church.  They moved to Sussex permanently and since they found that there were many Catholics in that area who didn’t have a church close to them, they build a chapel dedicated to St Therese Martin, on their land.   As time passed Sheila wrote more on religious themes, in fiction and nonfiction. However she was never narrow minded, and she was unpretentious about her work, seeing herself as a novelist who was not of the first rank.

I’ve read most of her novels, including her most famous Joanna Godden and Sussex Gorse, but my favourite works by her are her books on Jane Austen, she and her friend GB Stern, wrote light but interesting literary criticism of their favourite author. I find that many of my ideas on Jane Austen have come form those 2 books, which I frequently re read.