E-Book, Englisch, 239 Seiten
Roberts Feet in Chains
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-908946-64-5
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 239 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-908946-64-5
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the towering figure of Welsh- language fiction in the twentieth century. Feet in Chains is her masterpiece. Katie Gramich's translation does justice to the austere beauty of Roberts's style and takes the reader into the heart of a different culture, a different world.
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Introduction
Kate Roberts
Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the most important Welsh female novelist and short story writer of the twentieth century. From 1918 to the early 1980s she produced an impressive body of literary work, including eighteen volumes of creative prose, extensive political journalism, a number of plays, many critical essays, and a voluminous and fascinating correspondence. In addition to being a writer, she was a political activist and one of the first and most industrious members of Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, founded in 1925, as well as an impassioned and successful campaigner for Welsh-medium education.
Katherine Roberts was born in 1891 in the small Caernarfonshire village of Rhosgadfan, which is lightly fictionalised as ‘Moel Arian’ in the novel, Feet in Chains. The eldest of what would be the four children of Catrin and Owen Roberts, a quarryman and smallholder, she had three younger brothers: Richard, Evan, and David. Their cottage, which is still extant, was called ‘Cae’r Gors’, meaning ‘the field of the marsh’, and the name is an accurate indication of the landscape surrounding it: this is upland north-west Wales, not far from the massive peaks of Snowdonia.
Roberts won a scholarship to the County School in Caernarfon in 1904 and went on in 1910 to study at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, where she was one of a very small number of female students at the time. She was acutely aware of her privilege and of the financial sacrifice her education meant for her parents. She studied Welsh, although, according to the Anglicizing educational policies of the time, all her lectures were ironically through the medium of English. Nevertheless, the Welsh Society at Bangor was lively and the young Kate Roberts was at the heart of its various cultural and social activities: eisteddfods, debates, and student newspapers.
She left Bangor in 1913 with a degree in Welsh and a teacher’s certificate. She took a post as a Primary School teacher in Llanberis for a year; her salary here was only £60 a year, and she was unable to teach her own specialism, leaving her feeling frustrated, much like the character, Twm, in Feet in Chains. In February 1915, though, she took up a teaching post at a Secondary School in Ystalyfera in the Swansea Valley, which had become vacant owing to a male teacher leaving to go to War. The move to south Wales was quite a wrench for Roberts and at first she found it hard to understand the unfamiliar dialect, but this was the beginning of a twenty-year period of ‘exile’ in south Wales for Roberts and, although her homesickness for Caernarfonshire was powerful at times, it is clear that she profited from her different experience there. It is as well to remember that Feet in Chains, though redolent of Snowdonia, was actually written in the industrialized valleys of South Wales.
Forming a close friendship with two other women teachers, Betty Eynon Davies and Margaret Price, Kate Roberts began collaborating with them writing plays, which they also performed up and down the Tawe valley during the War. Kate Roberts’ brothers were by now soldiers in the British Army, their lives in imminent danger. The intense worry of this period is rendered in Feet in Chains, when Twm joins up and his parents anxiously await his letters.
After cutting her teeth as a writer in collaborative drama, Roberts began writing short stories at the end of the War. She said in interviews that what precipitated her writing was the death in the war of her youngest brother, David, in 1917, and the traumatic grief of that loss. She saw writing as a therapeutic activity, feeling that she needed to write or choke with anger and indignation. She asserted in her 1960 autobiography, Y Lôn Wen (The White Lane), that ‘everything important, everything that made a deep impression, happened to me before 1917’.1 And yet 1917 is, somewhat paradoxically, ‘Year 1’ in the history of Kate Roberts the fiction writer.
In 1925 her first volume of short stories, O Gors y Bryniau (From the Marsh in the Hills) was published. These early stories are rooted in a particular place, the upland Caernarfonshire landscape of her childhood. The characters and events of the stories are very much shaped by the place, a close-knit, Welsh-speaking community of smallholders and quarry-workers much like that in which Roberts herself grew up. But her work is far from being parochial. It is geographically specific, yet it speaks of a common early twentieth-century feeling of cultural anxiety and ‘things falling apart’, charting shifts in family and gender roles, and expressing a longing for what is past simultaneously with an overwhelming desire for change.
By the end of 1917 she had moved to a post in the Girls’ County School in Aberdare, where she became a prominent member of the Cymmrodorion Society, rising to president by 1925. Yet her energetic community activity was soon to be channelled in a different, more political, direction. Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh Nationalist Party) was founded in 1925 and at first Kate Roberts, an instinctive socialist, was reluctant to join, but by 1926 she had not only become a member but found herself Chair of the Women’s Committee. Joining the party signalled a decisive step in Roberts’ life as a political campaigner and journalist, but it also had directly personal consequences, for it was in the first Plaid summer School in Machynlleth in 1926 that she met Morris T. Williams, a young man ten years her junior, whom she would marry within two years.
Marriage at the age of 37 had immediate professional consequences for Kate Roberts. Due to the legal bar in place against the employment of married women as teachers at the time, she had to relinquish her post in Aberdare, and the newly-married couple moved to Rhiwbina in Cardiff in January 1929. Kate Roberts and her husband became dedicated political campaigners, united in their work for Plaid Genedlaethol Cymru, as well as sharing literary interests and ambitions. Freed from the burdens of teaching, Roberts continued to publish volumes of short stories, which show her gradual mastery of the form.
From Rhiwbina, Kate Roberts and her husband moved to Tonypandy in the Rhondda Valley in the summer of 1931. Roberts gained a first-hand view of the poverty of the Rhondda during the Depression: the many families living in a single house, the lack of food and clothing and, an important point for Kate Roberts, these people’s general lack of the Welsh language and their ignorance of its culture. In 1933-4 when she was writing the novel Feet in Chains she was being taken back in her memory and imagination to the north Wales of her youth, but it is clear that Roberts was very much concerned by the hardship of the people of the Rhondda on her doorstep. While Kate Roberts herself came from a poor background, in the early 1930s she and her husband must have counted themselves relatively well off in comparison with their neighbours in Tonypandy.
In 1935, though, the novel completed and a winner in the 1934 National Eisteddfod, Kate Roberts and Morris T. Williams decided to move back to north Wales and to take on a new venture. Williams was a master printer by trade, so it made sense for them to become partners in this major project: the buying and running of Gwasg Gee, a well-known publishing house, in Denbigh. This meant a move back to their native north Wales for both. For Kate Roberts the creative writer, though, this move was the beginning of a period of creative silence, as she dedicated her formidable energies firstly to making the press a successful business and, secondly, to writing for Baner ac Amserau Cymru (The Banner and Times of Wales), the newspaper which they took over at Gwasg Gee in the late 1930s. For a while, Kate Roberts the short story writer, novelist and playwright was transformed into Kate Roberts the businesswoman and journalist. When her husband died suddenly and unexpectedly in 1946, though, the second, lengthy period of Roberts’ life as a writer of fiction began. From the late forties until her death in 1985, she would go on to publish two further novels, two novellas, an autobiography, and six volumes of short stories. By the time of her death she was widely recognized in Wales as ‘the queen of our literature’.
Feet in Chains
Kate Roberts wrote her novel Feet in Chains in the early 1930s while she was living in 7 Kenry Street, Tonypandy, in the Rhondda Valley. Although the novel is set in the north-west corner of Wales, in the foothills of Snowdonia, where Kate Roberts was born and spent her childhood, and deals with the period from 1880 to 1917, the bleak vision of the novel is surely influenced by the dire economic situation of the South Wales Valleys during the Depression. In a letter written to her friend, the poet and novelist Saunders Lewis, in December 1933, Roberts mentions working on the novel but gives much more space to the material conditions of life in Tonypandy: she tells Lewis about donating clothes and money collected in Bala and Aberystwyth to a Salvation Army officer to distribute to the needy. She explains...
