Life
The daughter of a doctor, Sheila was born in St Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings, in Sussex, and 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 she married Theodore Penrose Fry, an Anglican clergyman, and in 1925 wrote a book on Anglo-Catholicism. By 1929 she and her husband had converted to Roman Catholicism. Penrose Fry therefore 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 Catholic church, they bought land on which they established a Catholic chapel dedicated to St Theresa of Lisieux, at Northiam, which still enjoys a large congregation. Sheila is buried in the churchyard there. Their house, Little Doucegrove, was later owned by novelist Rumer Godden, another female Catholic convert novelist.
Read more about this topic: Sheila Kaye-Smith
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Alvina felt herself swept ... into a dusky region where men had dark faces and translucent yellow eyes, where all speech was foreign, and life was not her life. It was as if she had fallen from her own world on to another, darker star, where meanings were all changed.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“There’s a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: “Where was I before I was born.” In the beginning was ... what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Italy is such a delightful place to live in if you happen to be a man. There one may enjoy that exquisite luxury of Socialism—that true Socialism which is based not on equality of income or character, but on the equality of manners. In the democracy of the caffè or the street the great question of our life has been solved, and the brotherhood of man is a reality. But it is accomplished at the expense of the sisterhood of women.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)