Women Writing on the Devon Land: A County's Women Who Wrote - circa 1965

       Recently, whilst working on various documents and research leads sparked off by looking at catalogues of A2A and Devon Heritage Centre for as yet unnoticed unpublished writings by women, I've stumbled upon a group of authors at one time or other were closely associated with Devon, who wrote and published novels and fiction that previously I'd not known of. I'm rather excited about this discovery and have decided to take a bit of a break from searching into the archives and am instead currently doing the rounds of various search resources to find out more about each of the 'new' 'lost' authors for a future, probably next post on this blog. The original source was The Oxford Guide to Edwardian Fiction , a recently published compendium, and wonderful source book.     Although at this stage it is only a summary, I thought I'd make a preliminary start and share some of what I've found so far about the writers with a few links to such of the books

  Churchyard at Salcombe Regis Church      Ten years ago I posted a piece A Handful of 2012 Anniversaries: Devon Women Writers; Names and Texts  in commemoration of the anniversary dates of several women writers whose births or deaths or written texts were occurring that year. Then I posted a follow-up Devon Celebration 2016 . So what follows here is another celebratory catch-up piece featuring a handful of writers with special events coming up during 2022.  **** 'Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won'. Cover of Lady de Lancey at Waterloo    I'll begin   200 years ago in 1822,   when Madeleine De Lancey died, on 22nd July.                 There's a post about Madeleine de Lancey on my earlier blog, Woman at Waterloo; Lady de Lancey; a Quiet Grave at Salcombe Regis . As I noted in that post Madeleine did not spend her life in Devon; in fact she was only briefly in Devon. The first page of Madeleine de Lancey's A Week at

Books published in or featuring Devon by Devon women celebrated 2022 'There is a little village in North Devon, sheltered from the sea by a low range of sand-hills that stretches for miles on each side of it. The coast turns westward here, and no cliff breaks that line of billowy sand; northward and southward it goes, with the rhythmic monotony of the sea. The sand-hills are dotted with tufts of the long star-grass, where the rabbits sit; inland they are covered with fine blades bitten short by the sheep. Seaward lies the hard ribbed sand, glistening with salt, and fringed with the white surf of the Atlantic'. (From Audrey Craven ,   by May Sinclair, first published 1897 - 125 years ago).          My next post arriving soon will  be a feature about a selection of books by women published in (or about) Devon 100, 110, 125 and 200 years ago.  They include Margaret Pedler's The Vision of Desire , and Then Came the Test , M.P. Willcocks' Wings of Desire and The Wick