A Female Tradition

Kirsti Bohata considers new publications that offer a feminist perspective on the Anglo-Welsh canon

Absences in literature tend to delight literary critics, fond as we are of dwelling on the tantalising interstices of texts and teasing out the import of intended or subconscious elisions. But in the case of Welsh women’s writing in English, it often seemed that a rather more challenging absence – a lack of writing itself – was the problem facing readers and writers seeking to explore and construct a female tradition.

The handful of women writers who occasionally surfaced from the margins, mutable tokens amongst a cabal of men, emphasised rather than alleviated the sense of something wanting. The recent publication of two major volumes in the new Gender in Wales series on Welsh women’s writing (in both languages) from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries marks an important turning-point in the field.

new welsh review

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