Menna Gallie

Menna Patricia Humphreys Gallie (18 March 1919 – 17 June 1990)[1] was a Welsh-speaking Welsh novelist and translator. She is best known for her novels in the English language and as the translator of the novel Un Nos Ola Leuad, under the title Full Moon, by Caradog Prichard, the Welsh poet and novelist.

Early life and education

Menna Patricia Humphreys was born in the mining village of Ystradgynlais[2], which was formerly in the historic county of Breconshire (now Powys). She was the youngest of the three daughters of William Thomas Humpherys, a carpenter from North Wales and his wife Elizabeth.[3] She came from a Welsh-speaking family, which on her mother's side was socialist[4]. Her mother was the secretary of the local women's section of the Labour Party; her maternal grandfather had helped to found the Labour Representative Committee (the forerunner of the Labour Party) in South Wales; and her uncle attended Ruskin College Oxford before becoming a Labour Party County Councillor.[5] For her part, Gallie was a life-long Labour Party activist.[6]

Gallie's family moved to nearly Creunant in the County Borough of Nealth Port Talbot. Shortly afterwards she won a place at Neath Grammar School. From there she gained a place to study English at University College of Swansea. While there she met Walter Bryce Gallie, a philosophy lecturer.

Married life

Gallie and her husband were married in July 1940, a month after she had taken her finals and five days before her husband left to serve in the Army during the Second World War. During the war Gallie worked for the Inland Revenue in Llandudno and London. After the war her husband resumed his post as a philosophy lecturer in University College, Swansea and they moved to Ystradgynlais, where they had a son and a daughter, Charles and Edyth.[7] Gallie and her husband were politically active, with a commitment to democratic socialism.[8]

In 1950, Gallie and her husband moved to Staffordshire in England to take up a post as lecturer in the University Collge of North Staffordshire (now Keele University). They stayed there four years, after which in 1954 they then moved to Northern Ireland, where her husband took up a chair at Queen's University Belfast. There they lived in a beautiful house in the grounds of Castle Ward, an historic property outside Belfast which shortly before had been given in lieu of death duties to the Government of Northern Ireland.

Literary Career

While in Northern Ireland, Gallie began her literary career with the publication of her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom (1959), which Welsh historian Dai Smith described positively as 'both an engrossing detective novel and a social panorama of a small Welsh village during the 1926 General Strike'.[9] In 2003 it was reprinted by Honno, the Welsh Women's Press, with an introduction by Welsh historian and biographer Angela John[10].[11] In 2012 it was dramatised by BBC Radio 4[12] by Welsh author and dramatist Diana Griffiths. And in 2020 it was reviewed by John Perrott Jenkins.[13]

Man's Desiring (1960) was described by a reviewer as a novel with "warm and winning ways", a gentle comedy of contrasts about a Welsh man and an English woman at a Midlands university.[14]

The Small Mine (1962) tells the tale of a young collier's death in an industrial accident in the same fictional village created in Strike for a Kingdom.[15] In 2004 it was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 by Diana Griffiths.

Travels with a Duchess (1968) documents the holiday of a menopausal wife from Cardiff in former Yugoslavia which the narrator retrospectively described as 'a terrible chronicle of debauchery.'[16]

Novels

  • Strike for a Kingdom (1959) (reprinted 2011); shortlisted for Gold Dagger Award
  • Man's Desiring (1960)
  • The Small Mine (1962) (reprinted 2010)
  • Travels with a Duchess (1968) (reprinted 2011)
  • You're Welcome to Ulster! (1970) (reprinted 2010)
  • In These Promiscuous Parts (1974)

Notes

  1. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  2. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  3. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  4. ^ John 2011, p. vii.
  5. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  6. ^ John 2011, p. viii.
  7. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  8. ^ The Independent Obituary: Professor W. B. Gallie, 5 September 1998. Retrieved 4 September 2012.
  9. ^ "Dai Smith's top ten Welsh alternatives to Dylan Thomas". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  10. ^ John 2011, pp. vii-xiii.
  11. ^ "Novels". Honno Press. Archived from the original on 1 September 2012. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  12. ^ "Strike for a Kingdom". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  13. ^ Jenkins 2020.
  14. ^ "Man's Desiring". Kirkus Book Reviews 1 February 1960. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  15. ^ "The Small Mine". Honno Press. Archived from the original on 5 December 2014. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  16. ^ Gallie 2011.

References

See also

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