Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1956) was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex, and lived most of her life in that county. She was an English writer, known for her many novels set in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent in the English regional tradition. Her novel Joanna Godden (1921) based in Romney Marsh was filmed in 1947. 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 world-wide sales. Amongst her works are Starbrace (1923), The Mirror of the Months (1925) and Joanna Godden Married and Other Works (1926). Her fiction was noted for being rooted in rural concerns: farming, legacies, land rents, the changing position of women, the effects of industrialisation on the countryside and provincial life, and latterly her religious preoccupations.
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.
Sheila Kaye-Smith (1887-1956) was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex, and lived most of her life in that county. She was an English writer, known for her many novels set in the borderlands of Sussex and Kent in the English regional tradition. Her novel Joanna Godden (1921) based in Romney Marsh was filmed in 1947. 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 world-wide sales. Amongst her works are Starbrace (1923), The Mirror of the Months (1925) and Joanna Godden Married and Other Works (1926). Her fiction was noted for being rooted in rural concerns: farming, legacies, land rents, the changing position of women, the effects of industrialisation on the countryside and provincial life, and latterly her religious preoccupations.
The Catholic University of America Press is pleased to present the second volume in our Catholic Women Writers series, which will attempt to bring new attention to prose work of Catholic women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries. Sheila Kaye-Smith was a best selling author who had published over 50 books in her lifetime, few of which remain in print since her death in 1956. The End of the House of Alard (1922) documents the choices made by the final generation of the aristocratic Alard family and the ways in which they, both willingly and reluctantly, bring the long line of their ancestral blood to a complete and sudden end. For some of them, the end of the Alard line is as painful to enact as it is for others to witness; for others it is welcomed as a necessary modernization or a true realignment toward religious integity and universal human truth. Some of the family's children yearn for individual liberty; others have it forced upon them. But none of them can find it under the burden of the Alard name and its crumbling estate. The End of the House of Alard is a novel about the human need for purpose, for a truth by which to live and for which to die. It is a novel about faith and idolatry, love and death, freedom and bondage, nature and grace. Put another way, it is about how human beings cannot escape the great challenge of salvation, of breaking free from false, man made gods in order to unite instead with the divine love of Christ. The novel's characters span a breadth of options on this spectrum and their various outlooks on life continue to reflect those available to us today.
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