Margiad Evans – författare

From the peaks of Eryri to dramatic coastlines, misty valleys and haunted mines, Wales is a land whose myth and folklore has long been reflected in a thriving storytelling tradition, with the dragons and sorcerers of the Mabinogion and Arthurian legend laying a path for later tales of the Tylwyth Teg, and the pitiless fair folk of Arthur Machen's fictional world.To show the breadth of the strange tales inspired by the Celtic history and local legends of Cymru, horror expert Aaron Worth presents an exciting new selection of Anglophone Welsh fiction, including folkloric retellings, classics of the early twentieth-century weird and chilling pieces by writers from beyond the country's borders. Featuring stories by Dylan Thomas, Christianna Brand, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Margiad Evans and many more, this collection welcomes you to the darker side of Cymru.

English literature has a fine tradition of rural writing, and one of this century's greatest exponents was Margiad Evans (1909-1958). Although born in Uxbridge, she was brought up near Ross-on-Wye, and it is the south Herefordshire borderlands, its farmsteads, hamlets and towns, which are the setting for The Old And The Young, her collection of short stories first published in 1948. These fifteen stories are a distillation and refinement of all that is best in Evans's writing. A close observer of nature, her descriptions of trees, water, rocks, the movement of air and the interplay of light and darkness, are both exact and fluid. She was equally attendant to the subtleties of the human world. Her child's-eye narrations are remarkably empathetic, coloured and informed by memories of an idyllic year spent with her sister on her aunt's farm near the Wye. But the countryside, though treasured, is not romanticised. A rose-covered cottage could mean isolation, poverty and back-breaking physical labour, as Evans herself experienced. Her sympathies with the old, the infirm, the lonely and the careworn are a constant strand. In many of these stories, all but one written during the Forties, the hardships of rural living are exacerbated by the war. Men are absent, families are separated, women have to shoulder added burdens. This collection is testament to the quiet heroism of the home front, to the stoic resourcefulness of those who have no cenotaph. Indeed, in war or in peace, it is Evans's ability to delineate the defining nature of small incidents, and to uncover in a precise locality moments of profound spirituality, which raise The Old And The Young to the level of a classic.

This vibrant and intense novel, first published in 1933, sees Arabella, a passionate adolescent girl falling in love with her local doctor. She develops a mysterious illness requiring his attention but he is unable to cure it. Finally she declares her love for him, but is rejected and sinks into depression. Moving to a remote farm in Wales she has a brief affair with a young man and agrees to marry him. But a chance meeting with the doctor makes her realise the her young fianc© will never match up to the man she has been obsessed with all her life.

A forced wedding in a freezing country church, where the only sound is the bride’s tears: so starts Mary Bicknor’s life of misery with the brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestuous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.

Creed was published in 1936 and was Margiad Evans's fourth and final novel. Set in Chepsford, a fictional industrial Border town characterised by drunkenness and brawls, it takes suffering as its subject matter. Domestic life is unsettled by strong opinions on love and sin, while notions of religion and fate are debated with passionate intensity.

Written as a series of nature journals, Margiad Evans' Autobiography (1943), is an extraordinary experiment in what she called 'earth writing'. It explores in delicate and precise detail the writer's intensely-felt, even mystical relationship with the natural world. From 1941, she lived in a farmworker's cottage, Potacre, on the summit of a hill above Llangarron and in sight of the Welsh mountains. A meditation on the difficulty of translating the reality of the 'now' into words, Autobiography traces a spiritual journey towards understanding the profound connection between all living things.

Country Dance is a story of passion, jealousy and revenge centred around ayoung woman torn between the opportunities and dangers of her life who growsup in an isolated rural community on the border between England and Wales. A classic love story where the rural way of life is no idyll, but a savage andexacting battle for survival.

Margiad Evans (1909 - 1958), essayist, memoirist, novelist and poet, was born in Uxbridge but got her inspiration from the Herefordshire Welsh Border country. First published in 1932 her writing career was curtailed in 1950 when a previously asymptomatic brain tumour induced an epileptic response whose effects became increasingly serious over the last years of her life. This book of three unpublished works spans that last period, and sheds light on the cruel fate which befell this talented young author and robbed us of 'one of the finest prose writers in English' of the 20th century.