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

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

      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

Mid-Devon; Spirit of Place & Plath & Pedler North of North Tawton  'This topographical heartland of Devon’s palimpsest of invisible and lost criss-crossing labyrinthine landscapes and texts happens also to be the focal point of several of Devon’s foremost and famous literary sites. North Tawton is a place of pilgrimage for writers seeking other famed writers, for it is where the literary couple Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath spent the last years of their marriage.' See Extract 3 from  Writing Women on the Devon Land on the Blog-page - Mid-Devon; Spirit of Place & Plath & Pedler Near Roman road south of North Tawton See also From the Devon Ridge Where a Book Began