Breakthrough Welsh Women

Writers & Artists

Amy Dillwyn

Elizabeth Amy Dillwyn (1845-1935) was a radical Welsh novelist, businesswoman, and social benefactor. She was one of the first female industrialists in Great Britain.  

 

She was born in Sketty, Swansea to a prominent family, her father was industrialist and politician Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, her older sister was lepidopterist Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, and her maternal grandfather was geologist and paleontologist Henry De la Beche. 

Amy Dillwyn wrote six novels, including The Rebecca Rioter (1880), Chloe Arguelle (1881), A Burglary (1883), Jill (1884), Nant Olchfa (1886/7), Jill and Jack (1887) and Maggie Steele’s Diary (1892). Her themes included feminism, social reform, and a favourable view of the Rebecca Riots. Research into Dillwyn's life has also shown a close relationship with her friend Olive Talbot through letters, who she called her 'wife' in diaries. From this, some theorize the unrequited love in her novels was inspired by this real relationship.  

 

Dillwyn was a keen businesswoman, in 1892 she inherited her father’s spelter works at Llansamlet, Swansea. She personally managed the industry and turned her business in to a registered company in 1902 – also paying off her father’s debts of over £100,000 by 1899 (worth £8 million or more today!) She served in various civic roles in Swansea, including membership of the organising committee of the National Eisteddfod, and as Chairman of the Hospital Board – during which time she raised funds for a new convalescent wing.   

 

Dillwyn was a strong supporter of social justice, campaigned for women’s suffrage and was one of the earliest women in Wales to join the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.  

 

She died at the age of ninety in 1935, and her life continues to inspire academic work, drama and works of art. Professor Kirsti Bohata is writing a study of Amy Dillwyn as part of a research project the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales at Swansea University. In 2018 Amy Dillwyn was chosen as one of the top 100 Welsh Women by Women’s Equality Network Wales. 

 

 

Angela V John

Angela V. John is a historian and biographer from Port Talbot. She is currently an Honorary Professor at Swansea University and president of Llafur, the Welsh People’s History Society. Influenced by E.P. Thompson’s ‘History from Below’ and developments in the study of women’s history in the 1970s, Angela began pioneering academic research into the lives of working-class women, gender history and suffrage. More recently, she has turned her attention to biographical history and has published biographical accounts of several women whose lives illuminate aspects of the cultural and political history of Wales.  

 

She is currently part of the Monumental Welsh Women panel, which is establishing statues of historical Welsh women across Wales. The first statue – of the ground-breaking headteacher Betty Campbell – was unveiled in Cardiff in 2021.  

 

 

Elaine Morgan

Elaine Morgan was a Welsh author born into a poor mining family in Hopkinstown, near Pontypridd, in 1920. Her talent for writing became evident at an early age and she published her first short story in a newspaper at 11-years old. Beginning in the 1950s, she wrote drama for television, newspaper columns and a series of books on evolutionary anthropology. She began writing screenplays for television during a period in which women authors were still very much under-represented in the field.

 

Follow this link to the BBC programme Hidden Heroines about her life:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/5SQ4jD8FVf10RlhG7mjcPPJ/elaine-morgan

 

Her television work included adaptations of How Green Was My Valley (1975), Off to Philadelphia in the Morning (1978), The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (1981) and episodes of Dr. Finlay's Casebook (1963–1970). She won two BAFTAs, two Writers' Guild awards, and gained the Writer of the Year Award from the Royal Television Society for her serialisation of  Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (1979). Her books on evolutionary theory, such as The Descent of Woman (1972), challenged male-dominated perspectives on the story of human evolution. In March 2022, a statue was erected in her honour in Mountain Ash; the town where she lived for most of her life. 

 

Menna Gallie

The author Menna Gallie (née Humphreys) was born in the village of Ystradgynlais in the upper Swansea Valley in 1919. She came from a working-class background, growing up in a coal mining area during the years of struggle marked by the General Strike and miners’ lockout of 1926 and the Depression of the 1930s.

 

As a gifted student, Menna went on to study English at Swansea University. There she met the philosopher Bryce Gallie, and the two were married soon after her graduation. She started writing fiction relatively late in life when she was 40 years old. As she later reflected, her role as wife and mother had not left ‘much time to be me, not much time to remember or think about the idea that’s long since slipped tidily down the sink with the dishwater or been wrung out hard with the nappies’. Her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom (1959), is set in a mining village modelled on the Ystradgynlais of her childhood. The novel was well-received, particularly in the USA where it was favourably reviewed in Time Magazine. She published a further five novels, including another set in a South Wales mining community entitled The Small Mine (1962).  

 

Her two ‘mining novels’ stand out from other examples of the genre for their especially sensitive portrayal of women and children in mining communities. They touch on women’s marginalisation from aspects of political life, explore how women of all classes are confined by their social roles, and expose the oppressive moralising that often accompanied issues of sex, marriage and childbirth. The novels are also full of references to women’s domestic labour, showing how crucial it was to the maintenance of the social and economic fabric of mining communities. Her writing is known for its satirical humour and mockery of pomposity of various kinds, as well as its exploration of the class system as a source of social injustice.