British novelist and playwright Sheila Kaye Smith was born near Hastings, England, in 1888. Her father was a wealthy physician, and she was educated at private schools. She took to writing at an early age, and had published her first novel by age 20. In 1924 she married T. Penrose Fry, the Anglican rector in her home town, but five years later they both converted to Roman Catholicism. Her husband resigned from the Angelican church and the couple moved to London, and later they retired to a country home they had bought in Sussex (the location of several of her novels). She turned out dozens of novels, several plays and short-story collections, a collection of essays and an autobiography, "Three Ways Home", which was published in 1937. She died in 1956.

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Sheila Kaye Smith

Writer