Constance Holme Biography

English regional novelist, born in Milnthorpe, Westmorland, where most of her fiction is set. Her most famous novel, The Lonely Plough (1914), was described by her as ‘the story of a landed estate, and of a big flood on a northern marsh bringing out the loyalty of the north-country character, not only to the living but to the dead’. Feudal relationships between landlord, agent, and tenant are also portrayed in her first novel, Crump Folk Going Home (1913), and in The Old Road from Spain (1916) in which the landscape, social life, and rural traditions of the region are vividly evoked. Many novels, such as Beautiful End (1918), The Splendid Fairing (1919), and The Things which Belong (1925), focus on the daily lives of working people of the area. Other novels include He-Who-Came (1930), and The Trumpet in the Dust (1921), the title of which was taken from a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, with whom Holme felt some kinship.