During the trip, Cider with Rosie, Lee's classic account of growing up in rural Gloucestershire, was in its embryonic stages.
Maidens' Trip (1948) proved to be a critical and a commercial success and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.
[6] The tale of a young English girl and her cantankerous father travelling together through India, it was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction in 1949, and later reissued in a Penguin edition.
The specialist canal book publisher M. & M. Baldwin pioneered the revival of interest in Emma Smith's work, by republishing her award-winning Maidens' Trip in 1987 and keeping it in print for many years.
Many years after The Far Cry had gone out of print, Hill found a copy in a jumble sale and wrote enthusiastically of her discovery in The Daily Telegraph.
In 2002 – 50 years after the Penguin edition – Persephone Books reprinted The Far Cry as one of a series of forgotten classics by women writers.
In 2008, Smith returned to writing with a memoir, The Great Western Beach, describing her childhood in Cornwall between the two World Wars.