Amy Dillwyn (1845–1935)
Autore di Jill (Welsh Women's Classics)
Sull'Autore
Opere di Amy Dillwyn
Nant Olchfa 1 copia
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Dillwyn, Amy
- Nome legale
- Dillwyn, Elizabeth Amy
- Data di nascita
- 1845-05-16
- Data di morte
- 1935-12-13
- Luogo di sepoltura
- St Paul's Parish Church and Holy Trinity Church, Sketty, Swansea, Wales, UK
- Sesso
- female
- Nazionalità
- UK
- Nazione (per mappa)
- Wales
UK - Luogo di morte
- Swansea, Wales, UK
- Luogo di residenza
- Swansea, Wales, UK
- Attività lavorative
- novelist
businesswoman
suffragist
industrialist
social reformer - Organizzazioni
- National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies
- Breve biografia
- Amy Dillwyn was born into a wealthy family in Swansea, Wales. Her father, Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, owner of the Dillwyn Spelter Work, became a radical Liberal Member of Parliament, and her parents and grandparents encouraged progressive ideas. In 1864, her fiancé Llewelyn Thomas died shortly before their wedding, and she never married. In her 30s, she became reclusive and suffered from an illness; writing helped her to recover. She contributed articles to The Spectator and between 1880 and her father's death in 1892, she published six novels. The first, The Rebecca Rioter (1880), concerned local riots against English taxation that her father and uncle had played a role in putting down. Recurring themes in her work were social reform, unrequited love, criticism of the upper classes, and female emancipation.
After the deaths of her father and brother, she inherited the family business and managed it herself. She began to wear "mannish" clothing for her work in a masculine world, which was considered eccentric in her day. She continued to be an ardent proponent of social justice and was one of the earliest members in Wales of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
Utenti
Recensioni
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/amy-dillwyn-jill-and-jill-and-jack/
Here Jill and her friend, Sir John Wroughton (an eligible young baronet), get together to rescue a friend who is being victimised by her guardians in house nearby both of theirs. There are frightful threats, intricate knowledge of local train timetables, and a daring rescue mission with one of the villains plunging to an awful doom. It’s non-stop melodrama and very entertaining if not quite up to the level of Jill on her own. Meanwhile Sir John’s mother, who starts by thinking of Jill as excellent daughter-in-law material, finds out what she got up to in the previous book and changes her mind; but it’s okay, as Sir John’s own views change in the opposite direction, and there is a happy ending all round. It would make a decent single episode of the Russell T. Davies mini-series, or maybe a two-parter.… (altro)
Here Jill and her friend, Sir John Wroughton (an eligible young baronet), get together to rescue a friend who is being victimised by her guardians in house nearby both of theirs. There are frightful threats, intricate knowledge of local train timetables, and a daring rescue mission with one of the villains plunging to an awful doom. It’s non-stop melodrama and very entertaining if not quite up to the level of Jill on her own. Meanwhile Sir John’s mother, who starts by thinking of Jill as excellent daughter-in-law material, finds out what she got up to in the previous book and changes her mind; but it’s okay, as Sir John’s own views change in the opposite direction, and there is a happy ending all round. It would make a decent single episode of the Russell T. Davies mini-series, or maybe a two-parter.… (altro)
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/amy-dillwyn-jill-and-jill-and-jack/
Jill is in my view the best of Amy Dillwyn’s seven novels (or at least of the six that I have read). It was published in 1884, the same year as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott.
Gilbertina Trecastle, known as Jill, flees her abusive stepmother and stepsisters and disguises herself as a lady’s maid in order to get close to the woman she loves. She has numerous adventures, including burning the whiskers off an amorous valet, a hilarious but unsuccessful stint as a dog-walker, and getting locked up in a Corsican charnel-house with the object of her affections. She is cheerfully amoral and doesn’t let herself get ground down by adverse circumstances. It would make a great TV mini-series – the story is pretty episodic, and well-told. I found the (electronic) pages turning really quickly. I hope someone recommends it to Russell T. Davies.
There was one plot point that I found legally questionable: at the end, Jill is financially redeemed because her father forgot to change his will when marrying her stepmother. I know that under current British law, a will is invalidated upon a later marriage, and I’d be a bit surprised if that wasn’t already the case in 1884.
This is the third and last of Dillwyn’s novels republished by Honno Welsh Women’s Classics. The introduction is by Kirsti Bohata, who is the current queen of Dillwyn studies.… (altro)
Jill is in my view the best of Amy Dillwyn’s seven novels (or at least of the six that I have read). It was published in 1884, the same year as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott.
Gilbertina Trecastle, known as Jill, flees her abusive stepmother and stepsisters and disguises herself as a lady’s maid in order to get close to the woman she loves. She has numerous adventures, including burning the whiskers off an amorous valet, a hilarious but unsuccessful stint as a dog-walker, and getting locked up in a Corsican charnel-house with the object of her affections. She is cheerfully amoral and doesn’t let herself get ground down by adverse circumstances. It would make a great TV mini-series – the story is pretty episodic, and well-told. I found the (electronic) pages turning really quickly. I hope someone recommends it to Russell T. Davies.
There was one plot point that I found legally questionable: at the end, Jill is financially redeemed because her father forgot to change his will when marrying her stepmother. I know that under current British law, a will is invalidated upon a later marriage, and I’d be a bit surprised if that wasn’t already the case in 1884.
This is the third and last of Dillwyn’s novels republished by Honno Welsh Women’s Classics. The introduction is by Kirsti Bohata, who is the current queen of Dillwyn studies.… (altro)
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/amy-dillwyn-chloe-arguelle-and-a-burglary/
This time, rather than juggle a large number of characters, Dillwyn has a basic triangle of her teenage protagonist, Imogen Rhys; the chap she probably likes more, Sir Charles Dover (a young baronet, not the only one in Dillwyn’s works); and the chap who really wants her to like him more, William Sylvester. We know, but none of the other characters do, that the impoverished Sylvester has committed a heinous crime by stealing the jewels of a family friend staying at the Rhys’s house in Wales – the burglary of the title. To make things more complicated, Imogen has a deep romantic crush on Ethel, the victim of the theft, depicted as an entirely normal part of the spectrum of emotional experience.
Imogen, who is tomboyish and headstrong, gets stuck into the defence of the local Welshman who is unjustly accused of the crime, much to the consternation of her family. She gets the innocent man acquitted, and must then deal with the competing calls on her affection. Meanwhile Sylvester undergoes agonies of conscience which are sympathetically portrayed.
Then Dillwyn’s love of melodrama strikes again, and just as Ethel, who has put two and two together, is about to reveal to Imogen that Sylvester was the thief, an accidental fire devastates the London social gathering that they are all attending. The fire seems to take up a large number of pages, and by the time it is over, Sylvester is safely dead and the others alive if crispy. It’s a little more gracefully executed than in the previous book, and of course Imogen and Sir Charles end up together.
You slightly wish that Imogen had found a way of getting together with Ethel rather than with Sir Charles, and you wonder why Ethel restrains herself from exposing Sylvester. But the story is told in a leisurely fashion, without the previous sense of hurry. It feels a bit more under control than Chloe Arguelle.… (altro)
This time, rather than juggle a large number of characters, Dillwyn has a basic triangle of her teenage protagonist, Imogen Rhys; the chap she probably likes more, Sir Charles Dover (a young baronet, not the only one in Dillwyn’s works); and the chap who really wants her to like him more, William Sylvester. We know, but none of the other characters do, that the impoverished Sylvester has committed a heinous crime by stealing the jewels of a family friend staying at the Rhys’s house in Wales – the burglary of the title. To make things more complicated, Imogen has a deep romantic crush on Ethel, the victim of the theft, depicted as an entirely normal part of the spectrum of emotional experience.
Imogen, who is tomboyish and headstrong, gets stuck into the defence of the local Welshman who is unjustly accused of the crime, much to the consternation of her family. She gets the innocent man acquitted, and must then deal with the competing calls on her affection. Meanwhile Sylvester undergoes agonies of conscience which are sympathetically portrayed.
Then Dillwyn’s love of melodrama strikes again, and just as Ethel, who has put two and two together, is about to reveal to Imogen that Sylvester was the thief, an accidental fire devastates the London social gathering that they are all attending. The fire seems to take up a large number of pages, and by the time it is over, Sylvester is safely dead and the others alive if crispy. It’s a little more gracefully executed than in the previous book, and of course Imogen and Sir Charles end up together.
You slightly wish that Imogen had found a way of getting together with Ethel rather than with Sir Charles, and you wonder why Ethel restrains herself from exposing Sylvester. But the story is told in a leisurely fashion, without the previous sense of hurry. It feels a bit more under control than Chloe Arguelle.… (altro)
Statistiche
- Opere
- 7
- Utenti
- 49
- Popolarità
- #320,875
- Voto
- 3.6
- Recensioni
- 7
- ISBN
- 10
This is the shortest of Dillwyn’s novels, I think, and it’s a straightforward though rather dark family melodrama. Reginald will inherit the Nant Olchfa estate if his cousins David and Gladys die. At David’s 21st birthday party, Reginald kills him and makes it look like an accident, and then sows sufficient discord between Gladys (another of Dillwyn’s teenage girls) and her fiancée to get them to break up. Reginald then pursues a path of carnage to try and get his way, and eventually meets his just doom horribly while trying to escape through a steel foundry. It’s not very deep but it is a rollicking good read, with lots of circumstantial detail of the Welsh countryside.
Nant Olchfa has never been reprinted since it appeared in nine successive issues of the Red Dragon magazine. However I have downloaded all of the component parts and stuck them together, and you can access the 151-page file here.
It’s 18 MB I’m afraid. Some day I may run the whole thing through OCR and see if I can get it into a more convenient form.… (altro)