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As part of the Centre for Kent History and Heritage’s celebration of inspirational Kent women writers, we are highlighting these articles to focus attention on some of Kent’s well-loved but also lesser known women writers. These women are either inspirational Kent women or women who have taken inspiration from Kent.

Inspirational Kent Women Writers

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May Aldington

May Aldington wrote Meg of the Salt Pans set in a Kentish village near Sandport (Sandwich). May was praised for her ‘excellent pen pictures of Kentish people — people that we seem to know without being able to actually recognise’.

Jane Austen

Born in Steventon, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, in 1775, Jane Austen often visited Kent, the birthplace of her father, and the long-term residence of her brother Edward Austen Knight, with whom she stayed at Rowling House and later at the magnificent Godmersham Park.

Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn, playwright and poet, was born in Harbledown, near Canterbury. Her works include Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, and The Rover.

Elizabeth Bowen

‘I perceived in Folkestone an absolute, insulating self-contentment. Nothing other than Folkestone did it aspire to. An English ‘resort’ versus the Irish Capital. The blotting-out of all my visual past was so total as to become giddying.’

Elizabeth Burgess

What is this play wrote by Burgess the Pastry Cook; To thrive she’s turn’d her Hand a thousand ways, But why attempt such things as writing Plays; Let her make Sacques, Gowns, Tarts, and Pies, And not presumptuously an Authoress rise.

Elizabeth Carter

‘My old friend, Mrs. Carter, … could make a pudding, as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.’ Elizabeth Carter, poet, classicist, writer, translator, and linguist was born in Deal.

Jessie Challacombe (1864-1925)

Jessie Challacombe

A devout Christian, Jessie, who was born in Dover, wrote religious stories for children. Her first novel Little Christopher’s Cross was inspired by the hymn ‘In Token That Thou Shalt Not Fear’ written by Henry Alford, Dean of Canterbury.

Dinah Craik

Although Craik was not a native of Kent—born in Staffordshire, raised in London with an Irish father and with prolonged visits to Scotland to visit her family friends—Bromley was where she made her home from 1869 until she died on October 12th 1887.

Catherine Crowe

Best known for her 1848 collection of ‘real’ ghost stories The Night Side of Nature: or of Ghosts and Ghost Seers, which documented ordinary people’s ‘actual’ brushes with ghosts and the supernatural, Crowe shot to public and literary fame during the 1840s and 50s.

Elizabeth Elstob

A pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon who lived with her aunt and uncle in Canterbury, Elstob can lay claim to be Canterbury’s first bluestocking or female scholar.

Sarah Grand

Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke), ‘New Woman’ writer, feminist campaigner and proponent of sex education for girls, lived in Tunbridge Wells from 1898-1920.

Cicely Hamilton

Cicely Hamilton was a feminist actress, writer and playwright. She co-founded the Women Writers’ Suffrage League and was a vigorous campaigner for women’s suffrage.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Author of The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett lived at Great Maytham Hall, near Rolvenden.

Victoria Holt

Victoria Holt was a prolific and popular author who was a pioneer of the genre known variously as the modern Gothic novel, Gothic romance or romantic suspense. Her novel The Shivering Sands (1969), is set near the Goodwin Sands.

Bessie Marchant

Bessie Marchant was born at Debden Court Farm, Petham, Canterbury on 12 December 1862. Her novel Yuppie is set in the world of ‘Bodsam Green’, a fictional reworking of Bodsham Green (near Ashford) and is inspired by her own childhood.

F.F. Montresor

Romance novelist Frances Frederica Montrésor was born at Walmer, 1862. Her first novel Into the Highways and Hedges is set in Dover where nursery-maids, children, Punch and Judy shows, minstrels, gooseberry sellers, beggars all rub shoulders on the beach.

Edith Nesbit

Edith Nesbit has close links to Kent. In childhood and adolescence, she spent formative years in the village of Halstead, in the Sevenoaks District. It was there that she began writing poetry, and she was living there when her work was published for the first time.

S.C. Nethersole

Susie Colyer Nethersole, author of rural fiction, was born on the 14 May 1869 at Goodnestone. Nethersole’s stories are set in the rural communities that her family would have known and are rich with local folklore and tradition.

Baroness Orczy

Baroness Orczy, the author of the Scarlet Pimpernel stories lived at Monkton and later Bearsted. She described Thanet as ‘not a beautiful part of England. It is flat; there are no hills, few trees, only big fields and wide spaces with the tang and smell of the sea all around.’

Mary L. Pendered

Author of pastoral tales, Mary L. Pendered lived in Herne Bay during World War One and ran a Soldier’s Club at Beltinge in a converted garage. Singing around the piano became a nightly event, with coffee and biscuits served to the men.

Bertha Porter

Biographer and bibliographer, Bertha Porter lived at Moyle Tower, Hythe. Developing an interest in psychical research, Porter assisted Edmund Gurney and Frederic W.H. Myers in their research for Phantasms of the Living.

Ann Radcliffe

Ann Radcliffe was a defining figure of the 18th century Gothic romance, with literary sensations such as The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1796), set in the exotic climate of southern Europe. However, Ann Radcliffe never went to Italy, even better she came to Kent.

Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West was a prolific and versatile writer - a celebrated poet (a candidate for the post of Poet Laureate in 1948) and author of fourteen novels, with those published in the 1930s proving both critically and commercially successful.

J.G. Sarasin

J.G. Sarasin, a popular historical fiction writer of the 1920s-1960s, lived in Canterbury and Harbledown for much of her career. She wrote 45 novels including The Mystery of Martin Guerre.

Edith Katherine Spicer Jay

Edith Katherine Spicer Jay, a writer of popular military tales, lived in Sandgate during the last ten years of her life. Her novels, which involved plots of military men ‘made good’ were shared among the soldiers at Shorncliffe Barracks who enjoyed her ‘realistic study of military life’.

Christopher St John

A prolific writer whose work covered biography, suffrage and avant garde plays, experiments in life writing, and over thirty years of journalism for British newspapers and magazines, including The Lady and Time and Tide.

Netta Syrett

Best known for Portrait of a Rebel (1929) which was made into the 1936 Katherine Hepburn film A Woman Rebels, writer and playwright Netta Syrett was born at 23, Harbour Street, Ramsgate in 1865.

Elizabeth Von Arnim

Published in 1909, Elizabeth von Arnim’s comic novel The Caravaners is a loving depiction of holiday disaster, based on a wet summer holiday of 1907. The itinerary includes Chatham, Leeds Castle, Sandgate, Great Chart, Staplehurst, Sissinghurst, Aylesford and Canterbury.

Florence Warden (1857–1929)

Florence Warden

Florence Warden was an actor and writer who lived at St Mildred’s Road, Ramsgate and later Beach House, Sandgate during the late nineteenth century.

Gertrude Warden (1859-1925)

Gertrude Warden

Gertrude Warden was an actress, then a writer. Her novel The Wooing of a Fairy was set in Lythinge (Lympne) near ‘a vast panorama of marshland … bordered by a row of Martello towers, which looked at this distance like children’s overturned sand pails and the sea.’

Jacqueline Winspear (1955- )

Jacqueline Winspear

Although Jacqueline Winspear moved to the U.S. at the age of thirty-five, Kent pervades her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood and provides prominent settings in her renowned and award-winning Maisie Dobbs series.

Pamela Wynne

Set in the years after WW1, Pamela Wynne’s Love in a Mist gives a picture of Margate as it appears to a range of observers, from a shell-shocked author who is sent there to recover his mental balance to his taciturn servant, who remembers his childhood holidays in the town.