Kaye-Smith's response to the latter was amusement: she placed a good-natured riposte in her novel "A Valiant Woman" (1939), set in a rapidly modernising village undergoing some gentrification. (Pearce, 2008). A subplot has an upper middle-class teenager, Lucia, turn from writing twee rural poems to undertake the great Urban Proletarian Novel: "… all about people who aren't married going to bed in a Manchester slum and talking about the Means Test." Her philistine grandmother is dismayed, as she prefers cosy rural novels and knows Lucia is ignorant of proletarian life: