Beschreibung:
This collection of essays rediscovers and reassesses the extraordinary literary legacy of the border writer, Margiad Evans (1909-48) - novelist, poet, short story writer and autobiographer.
Margiad wrote about the elderly, about love between women, about elusive, enigmatic characters. She is renowned for her ability to depict place, yet she also makes place reflective of the emotional and spiritual lives of her characters and her own concerns as an artist. Evans was a border writer, concerned with cultural complexity and conflict characteristic of borderlands, but also filled with passion for the landscape of the borders and the many meanings, local and figurative; she effortlessly invests in the places she loved. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumour that lead to her early death, on the evening of her forty-ninth birthday, in 1958. Evans wrote A Ray of Darkness, an acclaimed autobiography about her experience of epilepsy, and as a result Margiad Evans is being 'rediscovered' by the medical community as it becomes more interested in patient experiences. This collection of essays assesses Evans's extraordinary literary legacy, from her use of folktale and the gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.
1. Kirsti Bohata and Katie Gramich, Introduction2. Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan, The Archivist's Tale: primary sources for the study of Margiad Evans3. Diana Wallace, 'Two nations at war within it': marriage as metaphor in Margiad Evans's Country Dance4. Lucy Thomas, ‘Born to a million dismemberments’: female hybridity in the border writing of Margiad Evans, Hilda Vaughan and Mary Webb5. Katie Gramich, Gothic Borderlands: the hauntology of place in the fiction of Margiad Evans6. Tony Brown, Time, Memory and Identity in the Short Stories of Margiad Evans7. M. Wynn Thomas, Margiad Evans and Eudora Welty: a confluence of imaginations8. Kirsti Bohata, The Apparitional Lover: homoerotic and lesbian imagery in the writing of Margiad Evans’9. Andrew Larner, A ‘Herstory’ of Epilepsy in a Creative Writer: the case of Margiad Evans10. Karen Caesar, Warding off the Real: The recreation of self in Autobiography and A Ray of Darkness11. Clare Morgan, 'The Human Tune': Margiad Evans and the frustrating fifties12. Sue Asbee, ‘Not quite every character is a living person in this story. And not quite the reverse.’ Margiad Evans: Memory, fiction and autobiography13. Moira Dearnley, ‘Eternity is now my mood’: a view of the later writings of Margiad Evans
