Celebrating LGBT History Month – LGBT Themes in the Welsh Women’s Classics
Honno Press have over the years published a number of novels, short stories and poems with LGBT+ themes, many of them in the Welsh Women’s Classics series.
Amy Dillwyn’s novel Jill, for instance is the story of an unconventional heroine, much like the author herself, and is based on the author’s own passionate attachment to a woman she called her wife, but who she couldn’t have. Jill is a poignant story of same-sex desire and unrequited love and is an under recognised lesbian novel, written 45 years earlier than The Well of Loneliness which is often hailed as the first British lesbian novel.
The editor, Kirsti Bohata, writes in Diva magazine that:
“Writing against the patriarchal assumption that two women could only set up home together as a last resort, her novels validate lesbian love as a desirable alternative to marriage and family duties. In her novels, she turned to literary codes which emphasised a challenge [to the social order – her characters cross boundaries of gender, class and the law – in order to depict a same-sex desire that she wanted to be paramount, not a last resort.”
In Welsh Women’s Poetry, 1460 – 2001, the first bilingual anthology of Welsh women’s poetry, in both the Welsh and English languages – Honno have published several lesbian poets. Gwerful Mechain [1462-1500], the most well-known Welsh female poet from this period, often challenged ideas of gender in her writing. Her poem ‘I’r Cedor’ for instance subverts the expected medieval odes to women on their beauty and is instead written to female genitalia.
Sarah Jane Rees (1839 –1916), another lesbian figure in Welsh writing, edited Y Frythones, (a monthly Welsh language periodical for women), from 1878-1889 as well as writing her own poetry under the name Cranogwen. Examples of her passionate poetry to women can be found in Welsh Women’s Poetry, 1460 – 2001 as well as a poem written in loving admiration of her – ‘Cranogwen’ – by Buddug, another key female Welsh poet of the time.
Author Margiad Evans had an affair with Ruth Farr whilst married and lesbian themes are explored in her short story ‘A Modern Adornment’, published in A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales c.1850-1950, through the relationship between Miss Allensmoore and Miss Plant, elderly women who ‘lived together for many years in a cottage outside a small village’.
Another writer, Bertha Thomas, was a nineteenth and twentieth-century ‘New Woman’ known for writing in support of women’s suffrage as well as on themes of gender and sexuality, alongside Anglo-Welsh identity, published in the anthology Stranger Within the Gates.
The identities and themes of gender, sexuality and national identity that run through the writing of many of the great Welsh women writers of the past highlights the importance of keeping in print women’s historical writing to illuminate sexuality and gender in Welsh history.
You can find the texts listed above and below on our Classics page: Also check out our collection of lesbian novels, classic and contemporary, on offer for LGBT History month at: https://www.honno.co.uk/catalogue/fiction/novels/lesbian-fiction-collection/
With thanks to Mair Jones for her research on exploring LGBT themes in Honno’s books. Mair was writing an MA Dissertation on the Queer History of Wales while studying MA History of Wales at Aberystwyth University, and provided the material for this blog while volunteering for Honno.
Bibliography
Aaron, Jane ed. A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales c.1850-1950 An Anthology. Wales. 2002.
Aaron, Jane ed. Nineteenth Century Women’s Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity. Cardiff. 2010.
Bohata, Kirsti. Postcolonialism Revisited: Writing Wales in English. Cardiff. 2004.
Bohata, Kirsti & Gramich, Katie ed. Rediscovering Margiad Evans: Marginality, Gender and Illness. Cardiff. 2013.
Dillwyn, Amy. Bohata, Kirsti ed. Jill. Wales. 2013.
Dillwyn, Amy, Gramich, Katie. The Rebecca Rioter. Wales. 2001.
Dillwyn, Amy, Favre, Alison. A Burglary: Or ‘Unconscious Influence.’ Wales. 2009.
Gramich, Katie & Brennan, Catherine ed. Welsh Women’s Poetry 1460-2001 An Anthology. Wales. 2003.
Painting, David. Amy Dillwyn. Cardiff. 1987.
Roberts, Harri Garrod. Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature: Writing Wales in English. Cardiff. 2009.
Thomas, Bertha. Bohata, Kirsti ed. Stranger Within the Gates: A collection of short stories. Wales. 2008.
It’s easy to believe there might be. Belchite is a monument to the Spanish Civil War, a village left in ruins after it was taken first by the Republicans in 1937 and then by Franco’s troops in 1938. By the end, in a deadly game of cat and mouse, any building still standing was pulverised as the Nationalists troops moved from house to house hunting down the last Republicans.
Spain is a wonderfully earthy place and so are its guided tours. We march round the ruins with our guide Nati and a group of Spanish, most of them young. One of the girls mentions that her great grandfather came from here and Nati breaks off her spiel to discuss whereabouts he might have lived. We move off again, past the group of men tossing a section of mud-brick wall (fibreglass, it turns out – they are making a film), under a stormy sky that threatens rain.
un is fitfully hot, poppies bob their scarlet heads in the meadows beyond the perimeter fence, and it’s hard to take in the enormity of what happened in this place: in less than two years nearly 5,000 people lost their lives here. It was late August and extremely hot when the Republicans drove out the Nationalists in 1937. The bodies had to be hurriedly buried in a mass grave. A year later when the Nationalists took it back more than 2,400 people were taken prisoner, many of them dying later in the labour camps.
The photo, of course, might be from many years ago, before the ruins subsided quite so much. It might even be a digital reconstruction of different photos. By now I am handing out bookmarks with gay abandon and everyone is joining in the debate in lively Spanish, all reverence gone. We go round the village sizing up the ruins and arguing until we get to the last church, and there it is: wall and window in the foreground with an old iron bracket that might have been for a sign, and in the background the blind façade of the church.
Hilary Shepherd has lived most of her adult life in Wales, farming and making oak windows and kitchens, but during the 70s and 80s she and her family lived in Ghana and in the Sudan, which provided the material for her first two novels (Animated Baggage and 
If you intend to ask your authors to give talks, hold creative writing workshops, hold panels on various aspects of writing or genres, or invite publishers to put on an appearance for talks or editor sessions (always a good move and the authors will thank you!), make sure there are enough rooms. Most importantly, make sure the actual room/hall you’ll be holding the book fair in is large enough. You’ll need a fairly spacious area because you’ll be inviting lots of authors to participate… won’t you!?
Judith Barrow has lived in Pembrokeshire for nearly forty years. She is the author of five novels, and has published poetry and short fiction, winning several poetry competitions, as well as writing three children’s books and a play performed at the Dylan Thomas Centre. Judith grew up in the Pennines, has degrees in literature and creative writing and makes regular appearances at literary festivals.
Ar Awst 1af ymddangosodd clasur Cymraeg diweddaraf Honno, sef argraffiad newydd o’r nofel 
Mae Rosanne Reeves, yn un o aelodau sylfaen Honno, Golygydd y Clasuron Honno, ac awdur Dwy Gymraes, Dwy Gymru: Hanes Bywyd a Gwaith Gwyneth Vaughan a Sara Maria Saunders; Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2014 . / Rosanne Reeves, is one of Honno’s founding members, Editor of the Clasuron Honno, and author of Dwy Gymraes, Dwy Gymru: Hanes Bywyd a Gwaith Gwyneth Vaughan a Sara Maria Saunders; Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 2014 .
How long have you been working at Honno?
Now, sixteen years later, my feminism is more often expressed in the petitions I share on social media than in my appearance, but reading feminist and women’s literature published by the presses I discovered at Silver Moon has remained a constant. I have also discovered a few more along the way including Honno Welsh Women’s Press when I moved to Wales. During a recent discussion hosted by The Women’s Equality Network Wales in partnership with Honno I began to think more about these different labels such as ‘feminist’ and ‘women’s’ and what they have come to represent in publishing.
Therefore, is a press only a feminist press if all aspects of its operations are feminist-minded? And can this only be achieved if a press remains independent? Or is it the case that the ‘feminism’ resides in the output? But then should the output be solely about feminism or can it be more broadly influenced by feminism? Should feminist presses only be run by and publish women or is feminism actually a mind-set, an approach to be actioned by individuals of any gender? If a press is subsumed by a mainstream publisher is it a compromise or a progression? Although these questions are too vast to answer here they do reveal a complexity of purpose and thought which needs to be engaged with when discussing the future of women’s and feminist presses. Since the period of second-wave feminism – when many of these independent presses were first established – the publishing industry has changed dramatically and, as a result, presses like Honno are navigating a constantly shifting landscape whilst still trying to fulfil their key founding principles.
Honno can be labelled a women’s press because it publishes only women and even though not every title is explicitly about feminism Honno is certainly motivated by a feminist agenda. For example its commitment to publishing reprints of titles by women long out of print reintroduces the writings of our ‘literary foremothers’ to the reading community. This series highlights a distinct women’s canon and provides further evidence of a history of feminist consciousness pre-1970.
Margiad Evans (1909-1958) was Peggy Whistler’s pen name. She was born in Uxbridge, but claimed the Welsh Border country around Ross-on-Wye as her spiritual home from her first visit to an uncle and aunt’s farm as a child. The Whistler family moved to a house just outside Ross later when Peggy was twelve. That is where her writing career began, the towns and landscapes of the area a barely disguised backdrop to her fiction.
hroughout her life Evans wrote incessantly. Her husband Michael Williams donated many of her letters, journals and diaries to the National Library of Wales after her death. The 1930 years are written in bound volumes; later exercise books, or scraps of paper document her frenetic emotional responses to relationships, as well as always testifying to her abiding love of nature. A picture of an emotionally intense family life emerges in the earliest entries: quarrels with her mother, sometimes bitter rivalry with her sister Nancy, spats and arguments with friends. In The Wooden Doctor (1932) the narrator’s detached but shocking comment ‘our home among the quiet fields became a cage of savagery’ neatly sums up one aspect of her family’s relations documented in her journal.
Evans expended a great deal of emotional energy on writing her final novel Creed. Her diary entries for the period of its composition have none of the fun evident in the episodes described above. Life was hard and emotionally exhausting, and it is difficult not to see some of that leeching into the fiction. Creed was never reprinted after it first appeared in 1936, so Honno’s new edition is especially welcome. It is not a polished novel, it conveys a sense of being deliberately rough-hewn, as rough and uncompromising as its characters. It takes on and challenges ideas about love, belief and wickedness, and although the rain is practically incessant throughout, the descriptions of drenched nature are acutely and imaginatively observed, powerful testimony to Evans’s attention to detail, to her imaginative and unusual perceptions, and her skill as a writer.
How long have you been working at Honno?