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

      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...

'The recognised notion of the literary history of southwest England’s C19/early C20 texts is of a distinctly male lineage, and indeed even now the prevailing view is that the ‘Victorian manuscript of the Westcountry' [i] was written in the context of a patriarchal culture'. Extract 1 The Canon - or Not?  From  Writing Women on the Devon Land See The Canon - or Not?  Cover of Williamson's Tarka the Otter See also From the Devon Ridge Where a Book Began