Library of Wales: Young Emma

W. H. Davies (1871-1940) was a Welsh poet and writer who spent a significant part of his life as a vagabond in the United Kingdom and United States. He began publishing his own poetry in 1905 and became a popular poet in his time, mixing with leading figures of society.

At the age of fifty, towards the end of the First World War, W. H. Davies decided that he must marry. Spurning London society and the literary circles where he had been lionised since the publication of his Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, he set about looking for the right partner on the streets of London.Young Emma is a moving and revealing memoir told with disarming honesty and humour. Davies records his life with three women: from his affair with Bella, the wife of a Sergeant Major, to his year-long liaison with the gentle Louise, to the turbulent brushes with a society woman who fears for her own life at his hands. He finally meets Emma, then pregnant, at a bus-stop on the Edgware Road. This is the story of their love affair."Young Emma is a masterpiece, and stranger than any fiction" Sunday Telegraph"Classic... remarkable... an extraordinary manuscript" The Observer“An extraordinary memoir destined to become a classic” Publishers Weekly