Soon afterwards, having noted their own and some of their neighbours' need for a nearby church, they bought land on which they established a Catholic chapel dedicated to St Theresa of Lisieux, at Northiam.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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'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.

The Sheila Kaye-Smith literary society is based in St Leonards-on-Sea, meets regularly, and has published a chronology of her life and works, as well producing an annual journal, The Gleam.