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 to the latter was amusement: she placed a good-natured riposte in her novel
A Valiant Woman (1939), set in a rapidly modernising village undergoing some gentrification. (Pearce, 2008). A subplot has an upper middle-class teenager, Lucia, turn from writing twee rural poems to undertake the great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about the
Means Test." Her philistine grandmother is dismayed, as she prefers cosy rural novels and knows Lucia is ignorant of proletarian life: That silly child! Did she really think she could write a novel? Well, of course, modern novels might encourage her to think so. There was nothing written nowadays worth reading. The book on her knee was called Cold Comfort Farm and had been written by a young woman who was said to be very clever and had won an important literary prize. But she couldn't get on with it at all. It was about life on a farm, but the girl obviously knew nothing about country life. To anyone who, like herself, had always lived in the country, the whole thing was too ridiculous and impossible for words. Kaye-Smith's descriptions of the Sussex countryside, coast and marsh are still regarded as some of the finest. Several of her heroines are single parents and most face various gender-related trials, reflecting her early feminism as well as influences such as George Moore and Thomas Hardy (Pearce, 2004). Kaye-Smith also produced many short stories, and her journalism was published in national journals, magazines and newspapers.
Joanna Godden (1921), arguably Kaye-Smith's most famous novel, was set in
Romney Marsh. More than two decades later, a film adaptation was made, released in 1947 as
The Loves of Joanna Godden. Starring
Googie Withers, it had a score by noted composer
Ralph Vaughan Williams. The screenplay by
H. E. Bates includes however a very different conclusion to the story. Kaye-Smith's later books increasingly reflected her personal religious preoccupations, featuring characters tussling with spiritual crises and conversions within subtle discussions of the differences among Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, and Catholicism. Her plots (e.g. in
The Lardners and the Laurelwoods,
A Valiant Woman, and
Mrs Gailey) continued to reflect pre- and post-WW2 preoccupations of women's "middle-brow" fiction of the time. She explored national anxieties about social class, divorce, and women's "role", within a mainly rural but rapidly modernising milieu (Pearce, 2004, 2005). Her books share similarities with contemporary writers such as
Barbara Pym,
Marghanita Laski and H. E. Bates. Her descriptions of farming practices and economics, and village vernacular, are noted as particularly detailed and accurate for this genre (Cavalliero, 1977).
Joanna Godden and
Susan Spray were reissued in the 1980s by feminist publishing house
Virago. Since then her books are out of print, but are readily available on the used book market. ==Literary society==