The World of Kate Roberts

by Roberts, Kate; Clancy, Joseph P.

• ISBN13: 9780877227953
• ISBN10: 0877227950
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1991-08-01
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr

Summary

Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the foremost twentieth-century prose writer in the Welsh language. She produced a considerable body of fiction, seven novels and novellas and nine collections of short stories, and was active in the Welsh Nationalist Party as a publisher and a literary and political journalist. A contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson, she created the modern form of the short story in Welsh, and through six decades of writing earned a place with this century's masters of the genre.The World of Kate Robertsoffers in English a large selection of stories, many previously, untranslated, that span her long writing career. Joseph P. Clancy's translations convey the intensity, the insight, and the distinctive prose style with which this Welsh-language writer illuminates her characters' often heroic ordinary lives. This book contains twenty-seven short stories, two short novels, and "Tea in the Heather," eight linked stories of childhood in North Wales at the turn of the century. Excerpts from her autobiography provide background for the non-Welsh reader and an Introduction presents Kate Roberts' life and work largely through her own words.The experience of poverty is the vital center of Kate Roberts' fiction: material poverty in the slate-quarrying villages of North Wales and the coal-mining communities in the south at the turn of the century and during the Depression; and the cultural, moral, and spiritual poverty of contemporary life in a small town. This poverty defines the experiences and tests the resources of her characters. Her concern was to record, to examine, and to celebrate without sentimentality the life of the close-knit society in which she had grown up. What is most characteristically Welsh in Roberts' vision is that fellowship, membership in a community, is essential to the realization of the human self. "We never saw riches," observed Kate Roberts, "but we had riches that no one can take away from us, the riches of a language and a culture." Author note:Joseph P. Clancy, a poet and a leading translator from the Welsh, is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Theatre Arts at Marymount Manhattan College.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Pronunciation of Welsh

Autobiography (1960)

Pictures

Letters

Stories (1925-1937)

The Letter

Provoking

The Widow

Old Age

The Ruts of Life

The Loss

Between Two Pieces of Toffee

Sisters

The Victory of Alaw Jim

The Quilt

Red-Letter Day

The Last Payment

November Fair

The Condemned

Protest March

Gossip Row (1949)

Tea in the Heather (1959)

Grief

The Spout

Death of a Story

Tea in the Heather

A Visitor for Tea

Escape to London

Becoming Strangers

The Card Christmas

Dark Tonight (1962)

Stories (1964-1981)

Cats at an Auction

Buying a Doll

Flowers

The Journey

The Battle of Christmas

Two Old Men

The Treasure

Family

Hope

Return

Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Oh! Winni! Winni!

Notes

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.