Library of Wales: Turf or Stone

Margiad Evans was born Peggy Whistler in Uxbridge in 1909, but it was the Border Country around Ross-on-Wye which became central to her consciousness and her writing. She took the name Margiad Evans to reflect this sense of identity. Her first novel, Country Dance, was published in 1932, and is known as ‘The Welsh Wuthering Heights’. She also produced poetry and art, as well as two memoirs, including an account of her experiences of epilepsy.

A forced wedding in a freezing country church, where the only sound is the bride’s tears: so starts Mary Bicknor’s life of misery with the brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestuous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.