In part, Kennedy's history is an apology for her own fiction and an attack upon critics and reviewers who would dismiss her as being merely a popular writer. Kennedy also treated the subject in "The Novelist and His Public," an address given to the Royal Society of Literature, of which she was a member. The irony is that Kennedy's failure to be considered a novelist of significant stature by reviewers can be attributed to their judgment that she strove so to tell a good story that she frequently overloaded her narratives, making her characters appear thesis-ridden or pawns of an overly complex action. The reviewers point to such flaws as too many characters and melodramatic and sensational events. Many of her novels do read like soap operas.
Novelist, playwright, biographer, and critic, Kennedy was born in London and educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College and Somerville College, Oxford, receiving a second class honors in history in 1919.
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