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

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

      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

Women Writing on the Devon Land Illustration from The Nature Notes of An Edwardian Lady A – Z of Devon Women Writers & Places Y ... for Yelverton (or, more specifically, Dousland) Although she is still well-known as author of the popular books The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and The Nature Notes of An Edwardian Lady , early C20 Diarist/Illustrator/Naturalist Edith Holden is not usually associated with Devon, or the South-West of England. Neither is she generally remembered as author. But perhaps Holden's life-journey, which included many holidays down in Devon, and her artistic achievements need to be viewed from a new perspective. Since coming across her paintings and nature journals back in the seventies, when the country's Holden fandom went crazy for her books and off-spin of Holden inspired knick-knacks and merchandise - and more especially, after I found that she had loved Dartmoor and stayed there several times during the early