Margiad Evans’s 1932 novella Country Dance proved to be the perfect introduction to her longer fiction. Set in 1850, her first book tells the story of dairymaid Ann Goodman who, born half-Welsh and half-English, is a living, breathing embodiment of the Marches and of the duality that runs through all of Evans’s work. Torn between her jealous sweetheart, an English shepherd on a Welsh farm, and the romantic advances of a volatile Welshman on whose English farm her father serves as shepherd in turn, Ann must choose both a man and a country; a choice which means following one part of her blood and denying the other.
Here among the hills and valleys, the tall trees and swift rivers, the bland pastures and sullen woods, lie long shadows of things that have been.
While the story may sound as though it’s simple, and does perhaps owe something to the Female Gothic of the Brontë sisters, and especially to Emily, towards whom Evans felt a particular wild affinity. its character and strength lie in the precision of its telling, which is all Evans’s own. The novella is presented as a found record, Ann’s journal, written in the present tense indicative peculiar to the Welsh vernacular. In this form, embellished with an introduction and epilogue in Evans’s own voice, it takes on a vibrancy and honesty that a more conventional narrative structure could have lacked, and restores Ann to the centre of a drama from which — Evans imagined — local folklore would have supplanted the memory of her in favour of the two powerful men, of whom one was a lover and the other, ultimately, a killer.
It is already dusk when we are among the sheep. Ben fetches them together in the hollow called the Basin, and Gabriel and I sit down on a rock and wait for the moon to rise.
Margiad Evans thought of herself as an ‘earth writer,’ rather than a ‘nature writer,’ and here the landscape — which Ann sees every day and takes for granted as a backdrop to her busy life — is more implied than described. But Ann’s story is rich with household domestic detail, as well as dairying, shepherding, haysel and harvest, and its dramatic events stand in sharp contrast to the rhythmic life-force of its fascinating protagonist’s routine.
Country Dance breathes an intimate appreciation for the farming calendar, glows with bounty and hardship, and rings with the Welsh voices that Evans loved.