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

  By T Bonner - Polwhele's History of Devon, Public Domain,         Downes near Crediton in Devon is one of the county's country houses which has threaded in and out of my life from childhood. In the 1950's we drove past Downes on every trip out to Exeter in the 50's and each time I remember asking my parents, ‘Who lives there’? Later, during the years when my parents retired and lived in Crediton they loved visiting the estate for meals or coffee when a café and shop was opened.            In more recent times when researching other things I’ve occasionally stumbled upon the house and family linked with its once time occupants, in particular in connection with E M Delafield’s The War Workers, in which the heroine is a fictionalised Dame  Georgiana Buller of Downes. (See Devon’s Doublescapes ) . During the last couple of years, when I’ve been looking into the archives in search of forgotten manuscripts by Devon-...

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 ...

Archive record of Dorothy Holman at Devon Heritage Centre After rather a long gap posting, during which I’ve been busy catching up with other neglected writing duties, here I am again. This year my main plan is to concentrate on women who have not yet featured in this blog. In this first post I intend to delve into some of the local archives in search of texts by women writers who were linked with Devon. Many of these writings and their authors have virtually disappeared from public awareness. In 2016, Anna Boyd Rioux published an article entitled Erased from history:  'Too many women writers -- like Constance Fenimore Woolson -- are left to languish in moldy archives. What will it take to bring them back?' Rioux continued: 'Feminist scholars have done the hard work of recovering women writers, but we're not there yet. Far from it' ... Two of the books on many of the best-of-2015 lists were written by women who died in virtual obscurity, Clarice Lis...