British Author
Born 1880 Died 1955
Constance Holme was was born on the 7th October 1880 at Owlet Ash
in the village of Milnthorpe in Westmorland, the youngest of the
fourteen children of John Holme and his wife Elizabeth Cartmel.
Both her parent came from prominent Westmorland families; her father
was the land agent for the nearby Dallam Tower estate and later
became a local magistrate and deputy Lord-Lieutenant of Westmorland,
whilst her mother was from a family who owned land in nearby
Farleton. Constance's education began when she was sent as a
boarder to the Methodist school at Oakfield Place in Arnside at
the age of eight. This was followed by periods spent at Buckingham
House in Birkenhead, Cedar Lodge at Blackheath in London,
after which she returned to live with her parents at Milnthorpe.
Inspired by the local Westmorland landscape she began to write
for her own entertainment and first found success as a local writer
with her first two novels, Staggie Three (1905) and
Hugh of Hughsdale (1906), being serialized in the
Kendal Mercury between 1909 and 1911. She wrote Duck
Egg Dick, a play in the local Westmorland dialect, which was
peformed in Kendal in 1912, although her subsequent attempts to
establish herself as a playwright met with little success. She also
wrote poetry which was published in the Westminster
Gazette and Country Life, which is now regarded as
being "skilful but minor".
Her first novel to be given national prominence was Crump
Folk Going Home which was published in 1913, when she was
almost thirty-three years old. This and her next two novels,
The Lonely Plough (1914) and The Old Road from
Spain (1916), were all set in the Milnthorpe area and featured
fictionalised accounts of life in the landowning class of Cumbria.
The Lonely Plough which featured a dramatic account of the
real-life River Kent flood of 1907 was the most successful of these
early novels.
On the 8th February 1916 she married Frederick Punchard at St
Peter's Church in Heversham. Like her father Frederick was a land
agent, in his case for the Underley Hall estate outside Kirkby
Lonsdale. The couple therefore settled at Kirkby Lonsdale where she
was to spend the next twenty years of her life. She wrote a further
five novels while living at Kirkby Lonsdale, all of which appeared
under her maiden name. The first four of these novels (which she
privately referred to as her Greek novels) differed from their
predecessors in featuring a taughter time scheme, with characters
from a humbler social level. The Beautiful End appeared
in 1918, followed by The Splendid Fairing, which was
awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse prize in May 1921, and The
Trumpet in the Dust (1921). A few years later what many regard
as her finest work; The Things which Belong (1925)
appeared to be followed by what was to be her final completed work
He-who-Came (1930) which featured a more 'supernatural'
theme.
Her novels received respectable reviews in the literary journals
of the time and Humphrey Milford, the chairman of the Oxford
University Press, became an enthusiast for her work and reprinted
many of her novels in the Oxford World's Classics series, and
unusually agreed to become the first publisher for her collection of
short stories entitled The Wisdom of the Simple which
appeared in 1937. However by this time interest in her work was
fading. The Saturday Review published an editorial on the
22nd January 1938 that claimed that "We are still hunting for
someone who has actually read Constance Holme's novels." In answer
to its query the journal received affirmative responses from eleven
readers, including a Ruth G. Brown of the Oxford University Press
who claimed that Holme "happens to be one of our most popular
authors". Nevertheless sales were falling off and in her later
years she received little in the way of royalties from her work.
When her husband retired in 1937, they returned to Milnthorpe
to live at her parent's former house of Owlet Ash. Her later life
was however to be plagued by ill heath as she suffered from
sciatica, neuritis, and tetany amongst other things, and spent
the rest of her life struggling to complete one more novel, The
Jasper Sea, which was never in fact finished.
Her husband died of bronchopneumonia on the 25th April 1946,
and with little in the way of income she could no longer afford to
maintain the property at Owlet Ash and by 1953 was confined to a
single room. In February 1954 she moved to a small terraced house in
Arnside in order to be closer to her sister Annie, but Annie died
just before the move could be accomplished and Constance followed
shortly after, dying of cancer on the 17th June 1955. Her funeral
which was held at St Thomas's Church in Milnthorpe and was attended
by fewer than twenty people
Bibliography
Novels
Collections
Plays
REFERENCES
Philip Gardner, ‘Holme , (Edith) Constance (1880–1955)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
Charlotte Stewart, University of North Carolina. (Edith) Constance Holme from Dictionary of Literary Biography. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale
'Holme, Constance' A Dictionary of Writers and their Works. Ed. Michael Cox. Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference Online.
Oxford University Press.