author

Edith Summers Kelley

1884–1956

A Canadian-born novelist who turned hard personal experience into striking fiction, she is best remembered for Weeds, a vivid novel of rural Kentucky life. Her work went largely unrecognized in her lifetime, then found new readers decades later.

1 Audiobook

Weeds

Weeds

by Edith Summers Kelley

About the author

Born in Ontario in 1884, Edith Summers Kelley studied languages at the University of Toronto before moving to New York. Early in her career she worked on Funk and Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary project and later became secretary to Upton Sinclair at Helicon Hall, where she was part of a lively circle of aspiring writers.

Much of her adult life was marked by financial struggle, and those experiences shaped her fiction. She worked as a teacher and lived through a series of difficult ventures with her family, including tenant tobacco farming in Kentucky and later ranching and other jobs in California. Those years gave her firsthand knowledge of working-class hardship, women's labor, and the pressure of everyday survival.

That lived experience gave her novels their force. Weeds was published in 1923 and drew on Kentucky farm life; her second novel, The Devil's Hand, was completed later but not published until long after her death in 1956. Today she is often valued for her unsentimental realism and for the way she wrote about women whose ambitions and inner lives were constrained by the worlds around them.