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

  Remembering Edith Dart, Crediton’s Edwardian Novelist and Poet; As a novelist in “Miriam,” in “Likeness,” in “Rebecca Drew,” and especially in “Sareel,” Devon lives again' (Quotation from Obituary for Edith Dart by Mary Patricia Willcocks) The Grand Affair General Buller's Return to Crediton 1900 I am grateful to staff at Crediton Museum for locating the image. ‘Miss Edith Dart, attired in a costume of purple tweed with longer black picture hat presented Lady Audrey Buller with a magnificent shower bouquet with red, white and blue favours’. (The Scotsman 2 November 1900). General Buller's Return to Crediton 1900 I am grateful to staff at Crediton Museum for locating this image.        As far as I’m aware the vivid depiction in the passage above picturing  the young writer and  Crediton born woman who, at the time the article from which this quote was written and published in The Scotsman, 2nd November 1900, was about 27, is the only extant description of her. (And it is p

Map with Northlew showing Horrathorn            From the first moment I came across references to her the C19 female Devon preacher/memoirist/ letter writer Ann Mason Freeman caught my attention.  Here is the opening of her Memoir:           You will find various online sources which feature Ann, so she's not entirely extinguished from Devon's history. But she is one of the lucky ones, records about Freeman's life and her memoir only survive because of her links with the Bible Christians , one of the evangelical movements which sprang up in the westcountry during the C19. Initially Ann Freeman intrigued me because her home background, a farming family in west Devon, was similar to that of many of my own ancestors and as well she had lived not far from the parishes with which branches of our family were also rooted for hundreds of years. Broadly speaking, that takes in parishes that lie within a triangle formed by the point of Okehampton, Barnstaple and Bude - Br

      Women Writing on the Devon Land A-Z of Devon Women Writers and Places   Z is Zeal Monachorum A passage taken from The Splendid Folly , Pedler's first novel, published in 1917. It is not just Devon's 'Queen of Crime' Agatha Christie whose prestigious textual contribution to the genre of crime left its distinctive mark on the literary achievements provided by women writers from the author's home county. Less well-known nowadays - and admittedly, some might judge, a less 'worthy' Devon writer than Christie - was 'Queen of Romance', Margaret Pedler, whose first novel The Splendid Folly, was published just over one hundred years ago, in 1917. The novel received fair reviews from newspapers at the time, including The Western Times, which reported that 'Mrs Pedler would herself make no high literary claims for The Splendid Folly. She set herself simply to write a readable, entertaining, love story with a touch of Devonshire setting