Margiad Evans came into my life like the proverbial bolt from the blue. One moment, I had no idea of her existence; the next, I wanted to read everything she’d ever written. The catalyst was a piece by Steven Lovatt, ‘How Margiad Evans wrote the earth’, on the excellent Land Lines Project blog. As I pored over Lovatt’s tribute to Evans’s work, and in particular her memoir Autobiography, I knew immediately, viscerally and reflexively that Evans was a writer whose work I needed in my life. I could taste it. And so I set out upon the road to reading everything I could find, and to record that reading through posts with the hashtag #MyMargiadEvansReadingProject on Instagram.
English by birth, Welsh by adoption, liminal by nature, Margiad Evans spent the most creatively significant period of her life in the Welsh border country of Herefordshire. Evans’s spiritual home since childhood, the few years that she lived there as a grown woman informed her writing throughout her too-brief adult life.
Evans knew with a primal poet’s instinct that children and the elderly share an awareness of the thin places: that wonder, memory, and adjacency to birth and death show them the world in a way that the engagements and impositions of middle life do not permit. That gift persisted in her, and it is that indivisibility from nature — to which she, like the old and the young, was susceptible — that lends her ‘earth writing’ its power. Nature was a portal to a place of almost mystic understanding, within and beyond the words which she spun, like straw into gold, to describe observations and sensations.
Give me a sight of you to take back to England with me. I am not speaking Welsh, though indeed it is on the end of my tongue, cariad.
Margiad Evans, Country Dance
Bilingual road signs appear and disappear when you travel any distance in the Welsh borderlands of Herefordshire, dipping from country to country along lanes hemmed by hills and hedgerows, woods and water, corrugated-iron-and-baler-twine farmyards with sudden, surprising views of the Black Mountains. (It is a part of the world which I know slightly and love deeply; a place loaded with meaning, whose wild loveliness and stark realities I recognise in both Evans’s work and in the images captured by the photographer Steve Gray1 in his ‘Borderland’ project, which I discovered at around the same time. Both artists have the power to transport me there, when I have been away too long and the yearing for it, a kind of hiraeth, becomes too strong.)
During the Second World War, Evans lived alone in a stone cottage called Potacre, away in the hills; ‘off-grid’ a grinding reality rather than a lifestyle choice. She did farm work by day and wrote by night. For a woman who claimed to be disinterested, she showed remarkable empathy, giving voice to the hardships of rural life. She saw a landscape as brutal as it was beautiful, taking as it gave, shaping people, and her writing possesses the duality of the place that possessed her. Even the manner of her criminally early death has a fractured feel. Closed-off from the power of nature, her writer’s eye turned inward by epilepsy and then an inoperable brain tumour, she died on her 49th birthday, in March 1958.
Margiad Evans wrote four novels, Country Dance, The Wooden Doctor, Turf or Stone, and Creed, in an intensely productive period between 1932 and 1936. She also produced one volume of short stories, The Old and the Young (1948), two of poetry, and two published memoirs, Autobiography (1943) and A Ray of Darkness (1950). A third volume of memoir, The Nightingale Silenced, was unpublished at the time of Evans’s death, but has been made available for the first time, collected with journal entries and letters under the editorship of her nephew, Jim Pratt. By great good fortune, my unexpected passion for Evans’s work has coincided with something of a renaissance — all of the prose titles are in print, shared across the lists of three Welsh publishers, Parthian, Seren and Honno. I was able to find a second hand copy of her poetry collection, A Candle Ahead; only the second collection, Poems from Obscurity, continues to elude me. I have devoured the fiction, and been devoured by it in return. The memoirs are plangent, glorious, heart-breaking. Her poems wind and sing. Through everything she wrote, her devotional attachment to nature and the wild places, the fierce-gentle landscape of her border home, courses like blood.
When I began my reading project, I was already older than Evans lived to be. She wrote, ‘I show every symptom of becoming a rare cult after I am dead’.
I am made her acolyte.
Going back to this now… realizing that my familiarity with (and love for) the Welsh borderland near Whitchurch, Shropshire — coupled with your beautiful and potent words — makes it imperative that I read her work. xxx