to the latter was amusement: she placed a good-natured riposte in her novel A Valiant Woman (1939), set in a rapidly modernising village undergoing some gentrification. (Pearce, 2008). A subplot has an upper middle-class teenager, Lucia, turn from writing twee rural poems to undertake the great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about the Means Test." Her philistine grandmother is dismayed, as she prefers cosy rural novels and knows Lucia is ignorant of proletarian life: That silly child! Did she really think she could write a novel? Well, of course, modern novels might encourage her to think so. There was nothing written nowadays worth reading. The book on her knee was called Cold Comfort Farm and had been written by a young woman who was said to be very clever and had won an important literary prize. But she couldn't get on with it at all. It was about life on a farm, but the girl obviously knew nothing about country life. To anyone who, like herself, had always lived in the country, the whole thing was too ridiculous and impossible for words. Kaye-Smith's descriptions of the Sussex countryside, coast and marsh are still regarded as some of the finest. Several of her heroines are single parents and most face various gender-related trials, reflecting her early feminism as well as influences such as George Moore and Thomas Hardy (Pearce, 2004). Kaye-Smith also produced many short stories, and her journalism was published in national journals, magazines and newspapers. Joanna Godden (1921), arguably Kaye-Smith's most famous novel, was set in Romney Marsh. More than two decades later, a film adaptation was made, released in 1947 as The Loves of Joanna Godden. Starring Googie Withers, it had a score by noted composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. The screenplay by H. E. Bates includes however a very different conclusion to the story. Kaye-Smith's later books increasingly reflected her personal religious preoccupations, featuring characters tussling with spiritual crises and conversions within subtle discussions of the differences among Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, and Catholicism. Her plots (e.g. in The Lardners and the Laurelwoods, A Valiant Woman, and Mrs Gailey) continued to reflect pre- and post-WW2 preoccupations of women's "middle-brow" fiction of the time. She explored national anxieties about social class, divorce, and women's "role", within a mainly rural but rapidly modernising milieu (Pearce, 2004, 2005). Her