Women have long played an integral role in the literary heritage of Wales and in honour of International Women’s Day, Writing Wales takes a brief look at some of the pioneering women writers who first achieved success in the field of Anglophone Welsh writing.
Arguably one of Wales’ most successful women writers to emerge in the nineteenth century, Allen Raine achieved world-wide success with her fiction, which to date has been translated into numerous languages including Irish, French and Welsh. Born in West Wales in 1836 as Anne Adeliza Evans, she only adopted the name Allen Raine as a pseudonym. Best known for her 1906 novel Queen of the Rushes, Raine is credited with selling more than two million books, as well as contributing to a number of periodicals during her career.
Hot on the heels of Allen Raine came Swansea based author Amy Dillwyn. Born in 1845 the daughter of a Liberal MP, Dillwyn published six novels between 1880 and 1892. Rebecca Rioter, recently republished by Honno Press, was perhaps her most famous work and depicted the struggle against oppressive toll fees imposed on certain roads in rural Wales in the 1830s. Following her father’s death in 1892 Dillwyn inherited the family business and became a pioneering British industrialist. Her life and fiction is now the focus of a research project at Swansea University, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Success did not, of course, end there. Women writers continued to play a prominent role in twentieth-century Welsh writing in both Welsh and English, with authors such as Kate Roberts, Hilda Vaughan, Margiad Evans, Dorothy Edwards and Menna Gallie achieving notable success in the first half of the twentieth century. Interestingly, like Raine and Dillwyn, these writers have all experienced resurgence in recent years with new literary studies, the Library of Wales series and the Honno Classics range introducing their work to a new audience.
So why are these women writers still of such importance in contemporary Wales? Is it the glimpse their work offers readers of social and political matters of the time? Or even the fact that they were achieving literary success at a time when publishing was still a male dominated sphere? A simple answer is perhaps the appropriate; these women wrote with honesty about the people, experiences and landscapes they witnessed around them. They experienced and wrote about bereavement, illness and poverty, adversities which still affect so many women in Wales and the wider world today. Much of their writing may have been written over a century ago, but their presence and ability to inspire remains strong in 2013 and will hopefully continue to be so for many years to come.
Arguably one of Wales’ most successful women writers to emerge in the nineteenth century, Allen Raine achieved world-wide success with her fiction, which to date has been translated into numerous languages including Irish, French and Welsh. Born in West Wales in 1836 as Anne Adeliza Evans, she only adopted the name Allen Raine as a pseudonym. Best known for her 1906 novel Queen of the Rushes, Raine is credited with selling more than two million books, as well as contributing to a number of periodicals during her career.
Hot on the heels of Allen Raine came Swansea based author Amy Dillwyn. Born in 1845 the daughter of a Liberal MP, Dillwyn published six novels between 1880 and 1892. Rebecca Rioter, recently republished by Honno Press, was perhaps her most famous work and depicted the struggle against oppressive toll fees imposed on certain roads in rural Wales in the 1830s. Following her father’s death in 1892 Dillwyn inherited the family business and became a pioneering British industrialist. Her life and fiction is now the focus of a research project at Swansea University, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Success did not, of course, end there. Women writers continued to play a prominent role in twentieth-century Welsh writing in both Welsh and English, with authors such as Kate Roberts, Hilda Vaughan, Margiad Evans, Dorothy Edwards and Menna Gallie achieving notable success in the first half of the twentieth century. Interestingly, like Raine and Dillwyn, these writers have all experienced resurgence in recent years with new literary studies, the Library of Wales series and the Honno Classics range introducing their work to a new audience.
So why are these women writers still of such importance in contemporary Wales? Is it the glimpse their work offers readers of social and political matters of the time? Or even the fact that they were achieving literary success at a time when publishing was still a male dominated sphere? A simple answer is perhaps the appropriate; these women wrote with honesty about the people, experiences and landscapes they witnessed around them. They experienced and wrote about bereavement, illness and poverty, adversities which still affect so many women in Wales and the wider world today. Much of their writing may have been written over a century ago, but their presence and ability to inspire remains strong in 2013 and will hopefully continue to be so for many years to come.