Kaye-Smith's later books increasingly reflected her personal religious preoccupations, featuring characters tussling with spiritual crises and conversions within subtle discussions of the differences among Anglicanism, Anglo-Catholicism, and Catholicism. Her plots (e.g. in "The Lardners and the Laurelwoods", "A Valiant Woman", and "Mrs Gailey") continued to reflect pre- and post-WW2 preoccupations of women's "middle-brow" fiction of the time. She explored national anxieties about social class, divorce, and women's "role", within a mainly rural but rapidly modernising milieu (Pearce, 2004, 2005). Her books share similarities with contemporary writers such as Barbara Pym, Marghanita Laski and H. E. Bates. Her descriptions of farming practices and economics, and village vernacular, are noted as particularly detailed and accurate for this genre (Cavalliero, 1977).