Jane Williams (Ysgafell) (1806-85) and Nineteenth-Century Welsh Identity

Gwyneth Tyson Roberts Department of English and Creative Writing Thesis title: Jane Williams (Ysgafell) (1806-85) and nineteenth-century Welsh identity SUMMARY This thesis examines the life and work of Jane Williams (Ysgafell) and her relation to nineteenth-century Welsh identity and Welsh culture. Williams's writing career spanned more than fifty years and she worked in a wide range of genres (poetry, history, biography, literary criticism, a critique of an official report on education in Wales, a memoir of childhood, and religious tracts). She lived in Wales for much of her life and drew on Welsh, and Welsh- language, sources for much of her published writing. Her body of work has hitherto received no detailed critical attention, however, and this thesis considers the ways in which her gender and the variety of genres in which she wrote (several of which were genres in which women rarely operated at that period) have contributed to the omission of her work from the field of Welsh Writing in English. The thesis argues that this critical neglect demonstrates the current limitations of this academic field. The thesis considers Williams's body of work by analysing the ways in which she positioned herself in relation to Wales, and therefore reconstructs her biography (current accounts of much of her life are inaccurate or misleading) in order to trace not only the general trajectory of this affective relation, but also to examine the variations and nuances of this relation in each of her published works. The study argues that the liminality of Jane Williams's position, in both her life and work, corresponds closely to many of the important features of the established canon of Welsh Writing in English. Therefore, the parameters of this rapidly- developing field should be extended to permit the inclusion of her writing. JANE WILLIAMS (YSGAFELL) AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY WELSH IDENTITY Gwyneth Tyson Roberts Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Aberystwyth University 2015 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As the notes at the end of each chapter show, many people have been generous with their time and knowledge during my work on this thesis, and I am very grateful to all of them. I would also like to thank the helpful staffs of the libraries and archives I have consulted in the course of research, especially the staff of the National Library of Wales. I am very grateful to Professor Sarah Prescott for her advice and guidance as my supervisor; the fact that I have learned a great deal over the last four years and thoroughly enjoyed the process is due to her constant interest and constructive suggestions. Lastly - but certainly not least - I would like to thank the friends in Aberystwyth, Swansea, Oxford and London who over the last ten years have continued to ask how my work on Jane Williams was going, and then listened patiently to the answers. i NOTES This thesis follows the guidelines for references and the bibliography in the Modern Humanities Research Association Style Book (4th ed., 1991). Some of the material on which chapters of this thesis is based was also used in the following articles: Chapter 2 ' ' The fair sequester'd vale': two early poems of place by Jane Williams (Ysgafell)', in The International Journal of Welsh Writing in English Vol. II (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014) Chapter 5 ' ' Winding silkworms' cocoons without a reel': Betsy Cadwaladyr, Jane Williams (Ysgafell) and the writing of The Autobiography of Elizabeth Davis', in Almanac: a yearbook of Welsh Writing in English (Cardigan: Parthian, 2010) Chapter 8 ' ' An account obtained from authentic documents': Jane Williams (Ysgafell) as a Historian', in Writing a Small Nation's Past: Wales in Comparative Perspective, 1850-1950, ed. by Neil Evans and Huw Pryce (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2013) ii CONTENTS Page Chapter 1 Jane Williams (Ysgafell): a study in liminality 1 Chapter 2 Miscellaneous Poems and the birth of a writer 32 Chapter 3 Artegall and the patriotic imperative 62 Chapter 4 The biography of Carnhuanawc and levels of Welshness 93 Chapter 5 The autobiography of Betsy Cadwaladyr: an act of ventriloquism 122 Chapter 6 Literary Women and the expansion of Englishness 155 Chapter 7 Celtic Fables and imagined medieval Wales 186 Chapter 8 The History of Wales and two historical articles 216 Chapter 9 Jane Williams and religion 245 Chapter 10 Conclusion 272 Appendix 1 Twenty Essays: style and approach 299 Appendix 2 Twenty Essays: possible authorship 302 Illustrations 305 Glossary 312 Bibliography 313 iii CHAPTER 1 Jane Williams (Ysgafell): a study in liminality The purpose of this thesis is to argue firstly that the work of Jane Williams (Ysgafell) should be restored to a significant place in the nineteenth-century literature of Wales, and secondly that its current unjustified exclusion from the field of Welsh Writing in English is a consequence of the origins and history of that field. In support of the first argument, the thesis will trace the development of Williams's writing in relation to nineteenth-century Welsh identity. In support of the second, it will argue that the rehabilitation of her work within the constantly evolving field of Welsh Writing in English will permit the further development of that field by simultaneously making its content richer and its parameters more inclusive. Jane Williams had a professional writing career of more than fifty years; she lived in Wales for much of her life, studied Welsh language, literature and history, and used them as the sources for much of her published work. No other nineteenth-century Welsh writer in English presents an equally complex, and equally fluid, position in relation to Welsh identity. The way in which she created her very individual authorial voice and located herself in relation to her own personal history and to national, social, linguistic and cultural lines of demarcation calls to mind the voice of the blackbird which John Ormond celebrates in his poem 'Boundaries' (2004). The bird, says Ormond, uses "his obligato signature" to "define his territory, mark his boundary", and 1 essays yes out of his history Against all configurations of silence Through the one throat he happens to have.i The ways in which Jane Williams employed "the one throat [s]he happen[ed] to have", and the ways she used her distinctive authorial voice to define her multiple territories and mark her shifting boundaries offer the opportunity both to examine the development of an individual authorial voice and to analyse the ways in which the fluid and unstable elements of her personal, social, cultural, linguistic and literary liminality relate to more general components of national identity. For the purposes of this discussion I wish to use the concept of liminality proposed by Rob Shields - "Classically, liminality occurs when people are in transition from one station of life to another, or from one culturally-defined space to another" - and to argue that Williams is most productively seen as a liminal figure in both these senses.ii This opening chapter will consider the reasons for the current exclusion of Williams's work from the field of Welsh Writing in English and the ways in which the confusion caused by misleading and inaccurate accounts of her life and work have contributed to this exclusion. This will be followed by a brief biographical sketch of Jane Williams based on the surviving documentary evidence and a consideration of the ways in which her life and family background shaped her personal and literary identities. The chapter will then examine the processes by which Williams created and positioned these identities in relation to both Wales and England, and the psychological liminality that resulted from this positioning. It will further argue that the variety of genres in which she worked, and the fluidity and multiplicity of her authorial standpoints, are bound together by the complex of ways in which she located 2 herself in relation to Wales, and that the resulting liminality is a salient characteristic both of her body of work as a whole and of her authorial personality. This chapter will thus establish a framework for the examination of her writing in the chapters which follow, which contain an analysis of each of her books in chronological order and a consideration of the role of religion in her writing, and which locate each of these topics in relation to Welsh identity. The final chapter will present an overview of the ways in which Williams's position in relation to Wales modulated during her writing career, before concluding the thesis by arguing that the analysis of her work presented in the preceding chapters provides a compelling case for the inclusion of her work in the field of Welsh Writing in English. Welsh Writing in English: gender and genre In 2003, Ned Thomas pointed out that for Welsh Writing in English "there is no really settled canon or even a single set of agreed criteria which might establish such a canon"; while this fluidity and flexibility has potential disadvantages (permitting disagreement which is not always constructive) it also means that since the criteria are not fixed, no candidate can be automatically excluded.iii Katie Gramich has suggested that "the shifting, ideological" character of nationalism and national identity in Wales can offer a particularly productive approach to the work of many Welsh writers in English.iv Her point illustrates Homi Bhabha's influential argument that it is the 'inbetween' spaces produced by the articulation of cultural differences that "provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs of identity."v The writing and analysis of Welsh writing in English has led to the construction of an interlocking multiplicity of exactly such 'inbetween' 3 spaces which inevitably affect any attempt to chart these shifts in the character of Welsh national identity.

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