Few writers get a second chance at success, but after a hiatus of more than 50 years after her first work was first published, Emma Smith, who has died aged 94, enjoyed that rare experience with two acclaimed memoirs.

Her début novel, Maidens’ Trip, an account of life on the Grand Union Canal during the second world war, was published in 1948 and won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize. It was one of two novels written while she was working as a runner-cum-secretary for Laurie Lee, then a young screenwriter, in the postwar years. He suggested the nom de plume Emma Smith – she disliked her birth name, Elspeth Hallsmith, because its sibilance landed her with the nickname “Spitty” at school. She encouraged him to write Cider with Rosie. But though close, their friendship was never romantic, in part, Smith said tartly, because Lee was capable of loving only one person: himself.

In 1946 she travelled to India with Lee for a documentary. The soon-to-be independent country left an impression, and, pressed for a follow-up to Maidens’ Trip, Smith drew on the trip for the comedy The Far Cry (1950), another bestseller. The following year she married and, over the following decades, published little.

More than 20 years later, the 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.

The Great Western Beach (2008), typed on the same machine she had used for her earlier works, was a vibrant account of her childhood in 1930s Cornwall, and an immediate success. Smith repeated the feat with As Green As Grass (2013), which recalled her postwar adventures.

One of four children of Janet (nee Laurie) and Guthrie Hallsmith, she was born in Newquay, Cornwall. Young Elspeth and her siblings roamed local beaches, playing in rock pools, swimming and reading, to escape the stifling conformity of their middle-class parents. Banned from mixing with “hoi polloi”, she rebelled. In The Great Western Beach Smith recounted narrowly escaping the belt after playing with a boy from a Barnardo’s home.

Her parents’ marriage was desperately unhappy. During the first world war, Janet had served as a nurse, Guthrie a soldier, whose bravery earned the Distinguished Service Order and promotion to captain. But the conflict left him mentally scarred. His anguish exacerbated by frustration at the daily humiliations he suffered in his day job as a bank clerk, he was a domestic tyrant.

Her father was a formative influence on Smith as a writer – the two would read poetry together – yet his daughter later expressed relief at his abandonment of the family following a breakdown when she was 12. The family had then recently moved to Dartmoor, and her father left for St Ives to pursue a career as a painter.

Interviewed in the Guardian in 2008, she blamed his terrifying outbursts for her lifelong state of “extreme nervousness” at parties. “I always felt … I am going to disgrace myself and the family,” she said.

On the outbreak of the second world war, she escaped to work for the War Office, headquartered at Blenheim Palace. But she was bored and, when the chance came, volunteered to crew canal boats carrying vital supplies along the Grand Union Canal. A tough job, it offered Smith, still a teenager, exhilarating freedom and she would run along the narrowboat barefoot – she once forgot her shoes when on leave, to the consternation of her mother. It was canal life that inspired her to write Maidens’ Trip.

The Far Cry was written in Paris, during a heatwave, when Smith would take her portable typewriter to the Île de la Cité, and typed while sitting on cool cobblestones. It was here that, unseen, the photographer Robert Doisneau snapped her for Paris-Match magazine.

In 1951, she married Richard Stewart-Jones, who worked for the National Trust, within four weeks of meeting him at a new year’s ball at the Royal Albert Hall. He died of a heart attack six years later, and she was left with two young children and a portfolio of heavily mortgaged houses in Chelsea thanks to his misguided investments. After she had sold all but one house, Smith fled to rural Wales and an isolated farmhouse, her situation not dissimilar to that of her mother abandoned on the edge of Dartmoor 23 years earlier. The house had no running water or electricity.

There she continued to write – a series of children’s books and a novel, The Opportunity of a Lifetime (1978), published not long before she returned to live in Putney, south-west London.

Always redoubtable – she was recovering from a broken back caused by playing tennis with her grandsons when she wrote As Green As Grass – she went into hospital in January following a fall. Despite her decline, she insisted on completing the Guardian crossword every day and almost to the end would challenge her basic language skills by reading novels in their original French, dictionary to hand.

She is survived by her children, Barney and Rosie, and three grandsons.

• Emma Smith (Elspeth Hallsmith), writer, born 23 August 1923; died 24 April 2018