Introduction

Kate Roberts

Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the most important Welsh female novelist and short story writer of the twentieth century. From 1918 to the early 1980s she produced an impressive body of literary work, including eighteen volumes of creative prose, extensive politicaljournalism, a number of plays, many critical essays, anda voluminous and fascinating correspondence. In addition to being a writer, she was a political activist and one of the first and most industrious members of PlaidGenedlaethol Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party,founded in 1925, as well as an impassioned and successful campaigner for Welsh-medium education.

Katherine Roberts was born in 1891 in the small Caernarfonshire village of Rhosgadfan, which is lightly fictionalised as ‘Moel Arian’ in the novel,Feet in Chains. The eldest of what would be the four children of Catrin and Owen Roberts, a quarryman and smallholder, she had three younger brothers: Richard, Evan, and David. Their cottage, which is still extant, was called ‘Cae’r Gors’, meaning ‘the field of the marsh’, and the name is an accurate indication of the landscape surrounding it: this is upland north-west Wales, not far from the massive peaks of Snowdonia.

Roberts won a scholarship to the County School in Caernarfon in 1904 and went on in 1910 to study at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, where she was one of a very small number of female students at the time.She was acutely aware of her privilege and of the financialsacrifice her education meant for her parents. She studied Welsh, although, according to the Anglicizing educational policies of the time, all her lectures were ironically through the medium of English. Nevertheless, the Welsh Society at Bangor was lively and the young Kate Roberts was at the heart of its various cultural and social activities: eisteddfods, debates, and student newspapers.

She left Bangor in 1913 with a degree in Welsh and a teacher’s certificate. She took a post as a Primary School teacher in Llanberis for a year; her salary here was only £60 a year, and she was unable to teach her own specialism, leaving her feeling frustrated, much like the character, Twm, inFeet in Chains. In February 1915, though, she took up a teaching post at a Secondary School in Ystalyfera in the Swansea Valley, which had become vacant owing to a male teacher leaving to go to War. The move to south Wales was quite a wrench for Roberts and at first she found it hard to understand the unfamiliar dialect, but this was the beginning of a twenty-year period of ‘exile’ in south Wales for Roberts and, although her homesickness for Caernarfonshire was powerful at times, it is clear that she profited from her different experience there. It is as well to remember thatFeet in Chains, though redolent of Snowdonia, was actually written in the industrialized valleys of South Wales.

Forming a close friendship with two other women teachers, Betty Eynon Davies and Margaret Price, Kate Roberts began collaborating with them writing plays, which they also performed up and down the Tawe valley during the War. Kate Roberts’ brothers were by now soldiers in the British Army, their lives in imminent danger. The intense worry