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This essay collection rediscovers and reassesses a host of still little-known, pre-1914, Welsh women writers.
In the last few decades considerable advances have been made towards rediscovering, contextualising, and analysing women's writing from Wales. The combined influences of the post-1960s women's movement, the 1990s Welsh devolution successes, and the development of the 'Four Nations' school of British literary criticism, have together effected significant advances in the field of Welsh feminist literary studies. This book focuses in particular on: the fifteenth- to eighteenth-century Welsh-language bards, such as Gwerful Mechain, Angharad James, and Marged Dafydd; the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English-language poets, including Katherine Philips, Jane Brereton, Anne Penny, and Anne Hughes; contributors to the Romantic movement in Wales, such as the poets and novelists Mary Robinson and Ann of Swansea; the mid-nineteenth-century protesting voice of polemicists such as Jane Williams (Ysgafell); the Victorian English-language novelists, for example Louisa Matilda Spooner, Anne Beale, Amy Dillwyn, Allen Raine, and Mallt Williams, and their concern with national, class, and gender identities; and early twentieth-century Welsh-language writers engaged with Welsh Home Rule and women's suffrage issues, such as Gwyneth Vaughan and Eluned Morgan.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing. Chapter 7 is available Open Access at https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9780367353483_oachapter7.pdf
List of contents
Introduction 1. Problems of Authorship and Attribution: The Welsh-language Women’s Canon Before 1800 2. Cambrian Bards and Antiquarian Romantics: Anglophone Women Poets from Eighteenth-Century Wales 3. "Local and Contemporary": Reception, Community and the Poetry of Ann Julia Hatton ("Ann of Swansea") 4. "At Once Illogical and Unfair": Jane Williams (Ysgafell) and the Government Report on Education in Mid Nineteenth-Century Wales 5. Adapting the Risorgimento: Ideas of Liberal Nationhood in L. M. Spooner’s Country Landlords (1860) 6. "Our Poor Land of Wales": National Identity and National Heroism in Women’s Historical Fictions 7. Welsh Women’s Industrial Fiction 1880–1910 8. Gwyneth Vaughan, Eluned Morgan and the Emancipation of Welsh Women
About the author
Jane Aaron is Emeritus Professor at the University of South Wales, UK. Her publications include A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (1991), Pur fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg [Pure as Steel: The Welsh Woman in 19th Century Women's Literature] (1998), Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales (2007), and Welsh Gothic (2013). She is also the general editor of Honno Press’s Welsh Women’s Classics series.
Summary
This collection works to rediscover and reassess a host of still little-known, pre-1914, Welsh women writers. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women's Writing.
