Edith Constance Holme married name Punchard, was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 writer and playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

. She was born in Milnthorpe

Milnthorpe

Milnthorpe is a large village within the South Lakeland district of Cumbria, England. Straddling the A6 road, the town contains several old hostelries and hosts a market in The Square every Friday...

, Westmorland (now in Cumbria

Cumbria

Cumbria , is a non-metropolitan county in North West England. The county and Cumbria County Council, its local authority, came into existence in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972. Cumbria's largest settlement and county town is Carlisle. It consists of six districts, and in...

), the youngest of fourteen children. Her novels are set in the old county of Westmorland

Westmorland

Westmorland is an area of North West England and one of the 39 historic counties of England. It formed an administrative county from 1889 to 1974, after which the entirety of the county was absorbed into the new county of Cumbria.-Early history:...

, where she lived most of her life.

Many of Holme's works explore class relationships; her first two books focus on the three-way relationships between landowners, tenant farmers and land agent

Land agent

Land agent may be used in at least three different contexts.Traditionally, a land agent was a managerial employee who conducted the business affairs of a large landed estate for a member of the landed gentry of the United Kingdom, supervising the farming of the property by farm labourers and/or...

s (Holme's father and her husband were both land agents). Her 1921 novel The Splendid Fairing won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse.

Uniquely among twentieth-century authors, all of Holme's novels and her book of short stories were published in the Oxford World's Classics

Oxford World's Classics

Oxford World's Classics is an imprint of Oxford University Press. First established in 1901 by Grant Richards and purchased by the Oxford University Press in 1906, this imprint publishes primarily dramatic and classic literature for students and the general public...

 series. The Lonely Plough was also, in 1936, among the first novels published by Penguin

Penguin Books

Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

. Despite this, her reputation faded quickly after her death; indeed, it had been questioned even during her own lifetime, with the Saturday Review

Saturday Review (London)

The Saturday Review of politics, literature, science, and art was a London weekly newspaper established by A. J. B. Beresford Hope in 1855....

commenting in 1938, "We are still hunting for someone who has actually read Constance Holme's novels." Some of her books were reprinted during the 1970s; however, her final work, The Jasper Sea, remains unpublished.

Published works

• Crump Folk Going Home (1913)
• The Lonely Plough (1914)
• The Old Road from Spain (1916)
• Beautiful End (1918)
• The Splendid Fairing (1919)
• The Trumpet in the Dust (1921)
• The Things Which Belong (1925)
• He-who-came? (1930)
• Four One-Act Plays (1932)
• The Wisdom of the Simple and other Stories (1937)