Life
1896-1967; b. Hyde Park, London; dg. of Charles Moore Kennedy, a lawyer, and cousin of Joyce Cary; ed. Cheltenham and Somerville, Oxford; m. David Davies (later knighted); mother of Julia Birley, novelist; wrote A Century of Revolution (1922), followed by her hugely successful novel The Constant Nymph (1924; rep. Virago 1992, 326pp.) in which a teenage girl falls in love with a family friend who eventually marries her cousin; adapted with Basil Dean as a three act play (Garden City, 1926) and a silent film (dir. Adrian Brunel and Dean, 1928).
Commentary
Stephen Gwynn, Irish Literature and Drama (1936):‘as Irish, or Anglo-Irish, as parentage can make her; the scene of one of her novels is laid in Donegal, though this does not greatly signify.’
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