Sheila Kaye-Smith (4 February 1887 – 14 January 1956) was an English writer, known for her many novels set in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent in the English regional tradition. Her 1923 book The End of the House of Alard became a best-seller, and gave her prominence; it was followed by other successes, and her books enjoyed worldwide sales. Interest in her novel Joanna Godden (1921) was revived after it was adapted as a film titled The Loves of Joanna Godden (1947), which had a different conclusion. In the 1980s, this novel and Susan Spray were reissued by Virago press. Life The daughter of a physician and his wife, Sheila Kaye-Smith was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex. She lived most of her life in that county, apart from a period in London in her youth. She was a distant relative of writer M. M. Kaye (The Far Pavilions). In 1924 Kaye-Smith married Theodore Penrose Fry, an Anglican clergyman. The following year she published a book on Anglo-Catholicism. By 1929 she and her husband had converted to the Roman Catholic Church. Penrose Fry had to give up his Anglican curacy, and they moved to Northiam in Sussex, where they lived in a large converted oast house. Soon afterwards, having noted their own and some of their neighbours' need for a nearby church, they bought land on which they established a Catholic chapel dedicated to St Theresa of Lisieux, at Northiam. It still has a large congregation. Kaye-Smith is buried in the churchyard there. Their house, Little Doucegrove, was later owned by novelist Rumer Godden, another writer who had converted to Catholicism. A new biography of Kaye-Smith by Shaun Cooper, The Shining Cord, was published by Country Books in June 2017. Writing Kaye-Smith's fiction was noted for being rooted in rural concerns: the nineteenth-century agricultural depression, farming, legacies, land rents, strikes, the changing position of women, and the effects of industrialisation on the countryside and provincial life. Admirers of her work included her close friend G. B. Stern. They collaborated on two books about authors Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and Noël Coward. Kaye-Smith's novels encompassed more than one genre of fiction. Her earliest novels partly fit into the 'earthy' rural category, together with those of Mary E Mann, Mary Webb, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Hardy. This genre inspired Stella Gibbons's parody Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Kaye-Smith's response