Margaret Kennedy Collection

Margaret Kennedy (1896-1967) was a British novelist and playwright. She attended Somerville College in the years 1915 to 1918, studying Modern History. She began her career as a writer with the historical work A Century of Revolution (1922), yet it was her best-selling novel, The Constant Nymph, which catapulted her to fame in 1924. It was later dramatized, with Noël Coward in the lead role.

After her marriage in 1925, she turned her writing skills to plays, the most popular of which was Escape Me Never in 1934, starring Elizabeth Bergner. She returned to novel-writing at the close of the Second World War, and in 1953 won the James Tait Black memorial prize for Troy Chimneys. Her papers and correspondence were donated to Somerville College by her family in 2012 and are listed: M Kennedy Finding Aid (pdf 26kb)