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.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)