The Lost Voices of Welsh Women Writers by Alex Hale

The Lost Voices of Welsh Women’s Writing

by Alex Hale

Honno Welsh Women’s Press was established in 1986 with the twin aims of increasing publication opportunities for Welsh women and expanding the audience for Welsh women’s writing.

None of the publishing houses in Wales were particularly interested in promoting women’s literature or writers, especially not in English. The infl uence of Virago and The Women’s Press led the way. But of course, Wales was diff erent from England and there was a gap in the market in Wales for books which were relevant to the women of Wales, in both languages.”

Rosanne Reeves, Honno founder member.

In the late 1990s the Honno Welsh Women’s Classics series was created to bring the lost voices of Welsh women writers to a new generation of readers. The success of the project has led to other publishing houses reprinting works by Welsh women writers.

The fi rst Honno Classic title to be reprinted was Queen of the Rushes: A Tale of the Welsh Revival by Allen Raine (1836-1908). Originally published in 1906 and set against the backdrop of the 1904 Welsh Christian Revival, the novel begins with the sinking of a small boat in a west Wales fi shing village resulting in the deaths of several agricultural labourers. The incident orphans two of the main characters, forcing their lives to become intertwined. Part tragic love story and part social commentary, Queen of the Rushes remains an eminently readable novel.

Queen of the Rushes was Raine’s eighth novel and sold over 300,000 copies on release. Raine was an incredibly popular author in the early 1900s with her novels selling two million copies worldwide. Several of her novels were made into some of the very fi rst British silent fi lms. All were fi lmed on location in west Wales, though unfortunately have since all been lost. One of these fi lms, A Welsh Singer (1915), starred Hollywood’s Florence

Turner (pictured on the cover of Queen of the Rushes) and enraptured critics at the time with its performances and photogenic settings.

Despite such popularity, by the end of the twentieth century her work had largely been forgotten and she remains a relatively little-known figure in Wales. Queen of the Rushes was one of the first attempts by a Welsh writer, in English, to map out a distinctly Welsh literary landscape. At a time when novels set in Wales were regarded with suspicion by publishers unfamiliar with the country and unsure how their readers would respond, her refusal to compromise in this regard was inspirational. And because of this, Raine offers us a unique insight into the people of nineteenth and early twentiethcentury Wales.

Whilst Raine’s writing could sometimes romanticise the lives of rural Welsh communities, the author Kate Roberts (1891-1985) depicted the lives of working-class Welsh families with authenticity and realism. Roberts is often regarded as the ‘Queen of Welsh literature’. She was raised on a smallholding near Caernarfon and wrote exclusively in Welsh with most of her work also set in north Wales. The daughter of a slate quarryman, she said that she derived the material for her work “from the society in which I was brought up, a poor society in an age of poverty... [where] it was always a struggle against poverty. But notice that the characters haven’t reached the bottom of that poverty, they are struggling against it, afraid of it.” Her work is suffused with the spirit of the slate-quarrying landscape and the people that inhabited it. Hardship and loss are common themes throughout her novels, counterpointed by the resilience and hope of her characters.

Roberts was a Welsh nationalist and an early member of Plaid Cymru. She published sixteen volumes in total, but it was the death of her brother in the First World War that acted as the catalyst for her writing career. Her most acclaimed novel Feet in Chains (1936) charts the forty-year history of the Gruffydd family and the economic realities of a quarryman’s life. Many themes in the novel such as recession, poverty and insecure employment have modern parallels. So too does Roberts’ portrayal of family life and relationships; there are teenage romances, sibling rivalries and family secrets.

Roberts dramatizes her own loss of her brother in the war whilst demonstrating her skills as a story writer in a brief but incredibly resonant scene in Feet in Chains. Jane Gruffydd, the mother, receives a letter from the War Office informing her of the death of her son during the First World War. The letter is written in English, Jane can only read and speak Welsh. She suspects that the letter is bringing terrible news but must set out on an agonising search through her village for someone to translate it for her, whereupon her worst fears are confirmed.

Hilda Vaughan (1892-1985) was born in Builth Wells and published ten novels set in and around Radnorshire. Her first to be published was The Battle to the Weak in 1925, where the dawn of the twentieth century saw a new generation clashing with the conservative traditionalism of an old Welsh way of life. In the novel Rhys Lloyd and his engagement with the ideas of Social Darwinism and the League of Nations make him a dangerous figure in the village. The son of a Welsh-speaking Nonconformist, his love for the church-going Esther reflects tensions that have long and bitterly divided the community. Most striking, however, is the determined Esther who calmly witnesses the casual brutality of her agricultural upbringing, drawing on

an inner strength that would provide an archetype for Vaughan’s later heroines.

Vaughan was educated privately until the outbreak of the First World War, after which she served in a Red Cross hospital and for the Women’s Land Army in Breconshire and Radnorshire. Her work brought her into contact with women living and working on the local farms and those experiences became a major influence on her writing. Vaughan’s work is distinguished by its lyrical yet realistic evocation of Welsh rural landscapes and customs, and by her incisive analysis of the politics of class, gender, and nationality.

Eiluned Lewis (1900-1979) was a novelist and poet born near Newtown, Powys. For most of her life she worked in journalism, notably as a member of the editorial staff of The Sunday Times. The Lewis family also had a close friendship with J. M. Barrie who often visited the Lewis’s home on the banks of the Severn.

Her first literary success was the novel The Dew on the Grass. A bestseller in its year of publication in 1934, it was translated into several languages, rapidly went through a number of editions, and was the winner of the Gold Medal of the Book Guild for best novel of the year. The semi-autobiographical story is of nine-year-old Lucy and her siblings growing up in the Montgomeryshire countryside, with the novel being told completely from Lucy’s viewpoint. Lewis succeeds in creating a celebration of childhood through a streamof-consciousness account of Lucy’s experiences, a compression of childhood memory. Her second novel, The Captain’s Wife, was published in 1943 and was immediately popular being reprinted twice within a matter of months. The novel follows Lettice Peters, the ‘captain’s wife’ of the title, who has travelled the world on her husband’s ships but has now settled with her children in the little cathedral town of St Idris in Pembrokeshire. The coastline, farms, saint-haunted hills, and cathedral are skilfully evoked in this atmospheric and poignant novel, which looks back nostalgically on a period, sixty years before, when the rhythms of traditional Welsh culture were still intact, though losses and tragedies were still a part of women’s daily lives. The New Welsh Review describes it as “a vivid and sensuous response to nature, a detailed attention to social history and a sensitive interest in the viewpoint of the child”.

In 1944 she published a book of poetry, Morning Songs, which literary critic Kate Gramich comments on as being ‘lyrical and song-like, almost invariably expressing a sense of loss, nostalgia and longing.’ During her lifetime, Lewis was likened to Katherine Mansfield, Arthur Ransome, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. Despite her critical acclaim and the popular success she experienced in the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis’s fame diminished severely in the subsequent decades. Both her novels have recently been republished due to a renewed interest in female Welsh writers.

Other books in the Honno series cover political and feminist issues. The Rebecca Rioter (1880) by Amy Dillwyn satirises rigid nineteenth century gender roles; Eunice Fleet (1933) by Lily Tobias charts the treatment of conscientious objectors during the First World War and The Small Mine (1962) by Menna Gallie details life in a small south Wales mining community in the 1950s, one of the only female Welsh writers to do so. In addition, The Very Salt of Life is an anthology covering a century of Welsh women’s political writings from the 1830s to the 1930s. Its contributors include female Chartists, patriotic defenders of the Welsh language, feminists working for equality within religious and educational institutions, early socialists and ‘votes for women’ activists.

Despite being critically acclaimed or their works selling thousands of copies, many of these authors had become all but forgotten by the end of the twentieth century and most of their works were out of print. Jane Aaron, Professor of Literature at Swansea University, theorises that these writers’ reputations were affected by the double disadvantage which all Welsh women writers before Honno suffered, that of being Welsh and female. Before the 1970s and the development of Englishlanguage publishing in Wales, most Welsh writers in English were published in London where their work tended to be categorised as ‘provincial’. In addition, publishers, critics, reviewers, and university lecturers tended to be predominantly male. In the 1980s and 1990s Anglo-Welsh literature was taught at Welsh universities, with Kate Roberts being the only female Welsh writer to appear on any literature syllabuses. Now there are 33 women writers on Welsh university syllabuses compared to 44 men, and 21 of the 33 women are from the Honno Welsh Women’s Classics series. One of the aims of Honno Welsh Women’s Press in 1986 was to expand the audience for Welsh women’s writing for the benefit of new generations, an aim that is now truly on its way to being met.

SCRIBBLE

Meet the new Editors

Hello everyone, I am Aaina Jassel and I am taking English Literature as one of my A-Levels. I have been part of Scribble for the past 2 issues and have written a couple of articles and a book review. Scribble has been a wonderful way to explore literature in a way which is off the syllabus and can cater to everyone. I have loved both writing my own articles and reading other people’s. I can honestly say that I have learnt so much and every Scribble article I have read has allowed me to look deeper into things I have never even paid a second thought to. I am extremely happy to be part of the new editor team in the coming year and I would like to thank the current editors for giving us all guidance from ideas about articles to checking our grammar mistakes. Hope you enjoy this issue!

Hello, I am Isabel. Scribble has been running successfully for several years now, and as I am set to take over as editor, I hope we can maintain our tradition of exploring literary curiosity whilst also providing some new and exciting prospects for the magazine. For me, Scribble offers the chance to delve deeper into the world of literature which many have really only scraped the surface of; we are able to share our passion and knowledge with other like-minded individuals, also possessing a certain affinity for English, whilst still learning more about our interests in the process of writing. I am immensely grateful for the team of skilled writers I shall inherit, who, without a doubt, have contributed even more intriguing pieces for this latest edition, which will prove to investigate a perhaps more personal topic of Feminism – being at an all-girls school, this issue is sure to provide well-educated insight into feminist views and criticisms as we address one of the bigger issues in our society, inevitably projected onto literature and art for centuries. As seen in our previous Zeitgeist special, the spirit of the era seeps through into culture and allows one to get an impression of the general atmosphere and ideas of the contemporary period; following up from this, we focus this time on looking through the feminist lens at these various works. In this issue, one can see writings on the portrayal and perceptions of women through the ages, as well as on the empowering feminist critics and the works of female writers, which hopes to be one of the one of the most exciting yet. Anyhow, so as I do not prolong your reading of these splendid articles any further, I shall merely say a huge thank you to our previous editors, Holly, Lily and Grace, and express my wish that we, Libby, Aaina and myself, can only pick up the baton and carry our beloved publication Scribble as well as they.

Hello, my name is Libby, and I will be a new editor for Scribble. I have always been active in the English department; through book clubs and poetry writing sessions, to writing for Scribble every chance I get. I am very excited to undertake this new role and I have lots of ideas around the development of the magazine, especially surrounding the plan to add themes for each edition to keep them topical and cohesive. I think Scribble is an incredible opportunity to unite the (stereotypically introverted!) bookworms (and perhaps even those who don’t like to read) within the school to open dialogues about literary opinions and issues - my article on how much I dislike Harry Potter certainly did that! I can’t wait to see what happens next.