Edith Constance Holme (7 October 1880 – 17 June 1955), married name Punchard, was an English writer and

playwright A playwright or dramatist is a person who writes plays. Etymology The word "play" is from Middle English pleye, from Old English plæġ, pleġa, plæġa ("play, exercise; sport, game; drama, applause"). The word "wright" is an archaic English ...

. She was born in Milnthorpe, Westmorland (now in Cumbria), the youngest of fourteen children. Her novels are set in the old county of

Westmorland Westmorland (, formerly also spelt ''Westmoreland'';R. Wilkinson The British Isles, Sheet The British IslesVision of Britain/ref> is a historic county in North West England spanning the southern Lake District and the northern Dales. It had an ...

, where she lived most of her life. Many of Holme's works explore class relationships; her first two books focus on the three-way relationships between landowners, tenant farmers and

land agent Land agent may be used in at least three different contexts. Traditionally, a land agent was a managerial employee who conducted the business affairs of a large estate (house), landed estate for a member of the landed gentry, supervising the farmi ...

s (Holme's father and her husband were both land agents). Uniquely among living twentieth-century authors, all of Holme's novels and her book of short stories were published in the Oxford World's Classics series. ''The Lonely Plough'' was also, in 1936, among the first novels published by

Penguin Penguins (order (biology), order List of Sphenisciformes by population, Sphenisciformes , family (biology), family Spheniscidae ) are a group of Water bird, aquatic flightless birds. They live almost exclusively in the Southern Hemisphere: on ...

. Despite this, her reputation faded quickly after her death; indeed, it had been questioned even during her own lifetime, with '' The Saturday Review'' commenting in 1938, "We are still hunting for someone who has actually read Constance Holme's novels." Some of her books were reprinted during the 1970s; however, her final work, ''The Jasper Sea'', remains unpublished.

Published works

* ''Crump Folk Going Home'' (1913) * ''The Lonely Plough'' (1914) * ''The Old Road from Spain'' (1916) : US title, ''The Homecoming'' (Robert M. McBride, April 1916) * ''Beautiful End'' (1918) * ''The Splendid Fairing'' (1919) * ''The Trumpet in the Dust'' (1921) * ''The Things Which Belong'' (1925) * ''He-Who-Came?'' (1930) * ''Four One-Act Plays'' (1932) * ''The Wisdom of the Simple and Other Stories'' (1937)

Notes

Internet Archive and

HathiTrust HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries including content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally ...

provide full digital copies of ''The Homecoming'', published April 1916. The University of California copy at HathiTrust includes th
original front cover
The Stanford University copy at Internet Archive includes th
title page signed by Holme
Retrieved 2018-09-10.

References

External links

Constance Holme Collection
at the Harry Ransom Center * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Holme, Constance 1880 births 1955 deaths People from Milnthorpe 20th-century English novelists 20th-century English dramatists and playwrights