‘This is a handsomely
produced volume which will be of great value to scholars and of considerable
interest to the general reader alike.’ (Books in Wales)
‘This is a handsomely
produced volume which will be of great value to scholars and of considerable
interest to the general reader alike.’ (Books in Wales)
‘These letters . . . not only throw light on the evolution of a great mind but are also a moving personal record of the First World War and the carnage on the Western Front.’ (Scots Independent)
Saunders Lewis is the outstanding name in twentieth-century Welsh literature and a controversial figure in his nation's politics. These letters (discovered after his death in 1985) to the woman who became his wife not only throw light on the evolution of a great mind but are a moving personal record of the First World War.
Margaret Gilcriest, whose family was from Co. Wicklow in Ireland, and Saunders Lewis, the son of a Nonconformist minister in charge of a Welsh chapel at Wallasey, met when both were students at Liverpool University before the outbreak of the First World War. From the day he reported to his local army camp in November 1914 until their marriage in 1924 their correspondence was continuous while their meetings were relatively few and short.
The great bulk of the letters belongs to the period between 1914 and 1924. Their fascination is that they reveal many of the emotional patterns that later appear in his work without the comprehensive and highly structured intellectual views that are characteristic of the composite figure - dramatist, literary critic, politician, social thinker - we know and argue over as Saunders Lewis.