Emma Smith, a British author "who enjoyed a resurgence when her bestselling 1950 novel The Far Cry was republished more than 50 years later," died April 24, the Guardian reported. She was 94. Her first book, Maidens' Trip: A Wartime Adventure on the Grand Union Canal, was published in 1948 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. It was one of two books written while she was working "as a runner-cum-secretary for Laurie Lee, then a young screenwriter, in the postwar years," the Guardian noted.
In 1946, Smith traveled to India with Lee for a documentary, and then drew on the trip for the The Far Cry. The next year, however, she married and, over the following decades, published little, the Guardian wrote, noting that more than 20 years later, writer Susan Hill "discovered a copy of The Far Cry at a school jumble sale. It was, Hill enthused in her World of Books column in the Daily Telegraph, 'a forgotten masterpiece.' She lobbied for it to be republished, but the novel did not reappear until 2002. Soon afterwards the author was hunted down to write a memoir."
Smith subsequently published successful memoirs The Great Western Beach in 2008 and As Green as Grass: Growing Up Before, During & After the Second World War in 2013. She also wrote a series of children's books and the novel The Opportunity of a Lifetime (1978).