Books by Margiad Evans

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.

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 intrusive and serious over the last eight years of her life. She died at the age of 49. A Ray of Darkness, a unique account of her epilepsy, was first published in 1952 when it was hailed as a significant contribution to the clinical study of epilepsy by eminent neurologists. Its reprint now by Honno follows the publication, last year, of her final autobiographical work The Nightingale Silenced. It remains one of very few accounts of epilepsy written by a sufferer of this serious (but surprisingly common) disease.

At the heart of Country Dance is Ann Goodman, a young woman torn by the struggle for supremacy in her mixed blood, Welsh and English. This first-person account of passion, murder, and cultural conflict is set in the border country in the late 19th century, and the rural way of life is no idyll but rather a savage and exacting struggle 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 This book of three unpublished works spans that last period, and sheds light on the cruel fate which befell this talented young author and robbed us of ''one of the finest prose writers in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.