Menna Gallie

Menna Patricia Humphreys Gallie (18 March 1919 – 17 June 1990)[1] was a Welsh-speaking Welsh novelist and translator. She is best known for her novels in the English language and as the first translator into English of the Welsh language novel Un Nos Ola Leuad by Caradog Prichard, the Welsh poet and novelist, as Full Moon (1973).

Early life and education

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Menna Patricia Humphreys was born in the mining village of Ystradgynlais,[2] which was then in the historic county of Breconshire (now Powys). She was the youngest of the three daughters of William Thomas Humpherys, a carpenter from North Wales and his wife Elizabeth.[3] She came from a Welsh-speaking family, which on her mother's side was socialist.[4] Her mother was the secretary of the local women's section of the Labour Party; her maternal grandfather had helped to found the Labour Representative Committee (the forerunner of the Labour Party in South Wales); and her uncle attended Ruskin College Oxford before becoming a Labour Party County Councillor.[5] Gallie followed the tradition by becoming a life-long Labour Party activist.[6]

Gallie's family moved to nearby Creunant in the County Borough of Nealth Port Talbot. Shortly afterwards she won a place at Neath Grammar School. From there she gained a place to study English at University College of Swansea. While there she met Walter Bryce Gallie, a Scottish philosophy lecturer.

Married life

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Gallie and her husband were married in July 1940, a month after she had taken her finals and five days before her husband left to serve in the Army during the Second World War.[7] During the war Gallie worked for the Inland Revenue in Llandudno and London. After the war her husband resumed his post as a philosophy lecturer in University College, Swansea and they moved (in her case 'returned') to Ystradgynlais, where they had a son and a daughter, Charles and Edyth.[8] Gallie and her husband were politically active, with a commitment to democratic socialism.[9]

In 1950, Gallie and her husband moved to Staffordshire in England for him to take up the post as the Professor of Philosophy in the University College of North Staffordshire (now Keele University).[10] They stayed there four years, after which in 1954 they then moved to Northern Ireland, where her husband took up the post of Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen's University Belfast.[11] There they lived in the estate of Castle Ward, an historic property outside Belfast.

Gallie and her husband left Northern Ireland in 1967, upon his appointment as Professor of Political Science in Peterhouse, Cambridge.[12] When her husband retired, they settled in Newport, a village on the coast of Cardigan Bay, Pembrokeshire.[13]

Literary career

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While in Northern Ireland, and at the age of 40,[14] Gallie began her literary career with the publication of her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom (1959). Soon afterwards she wrote two novels in quick succession, Man’s Desiring (1960), a campus novel, and The Small Mine (1962), an industrial novel.

Northern Ireland inspired Gallie to write two novels about it. One novel, the 1968 Travels with a Duchess, was partly inspired by her visit to Dubrovnik in the former Yugoslavia (now Croatia) as the Northern Ireland representative at a PEN International (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) conference. The other novel was the 1970 You’re Welcome to Ulster, which drew upon Gallie's experience there as an active member of its Labour Party.

Gallie found Cambridge 'pretentious and hostile to women.'[15] Consequently, she was not inspired to write a novel about it. Instead, she wrote her 1986 novel These Promiscuous Parts about South West Wales and she produced the first English translation of the Welsh-language novel Un Nos Ola Leuad by Caradog Prichard.

Reviews, dramatizations and reprints

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Strike for a Kingdom was shortlisted for a Gold Dagger Award. Welsh historian Dai Smith described it as 'both an engrossing detective novel and a social panorama of a small Welsh village during the 1926 General Strike'.[16] In 2012 it was dramatized by BBC Radio 4[17] by Welsh author and dramatist Diana Griffiths. In 2020 it was reviewed by John Perrott Jenkins.[18]

A reviewer described Man's Desiring (1960) as a novel with "warm and winning ways", a gentle comedy of contrasts about a Welsh man and an English woman at a Midlands university.[19]

The Small Mine (1962) tells the tale of a young collier's death in an industrial accident in the same fictional village which featured in Strike for a Kingdom.[20] In 2004 it was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 by Diana Griffiths.

Travels with a Duchess (1968) documents the holiday of a menopausal wife from Cardiff in former Yugoslavia which the narrator retrospectively described as 'a terrible chronicle of debauchery.'[21]

Honno, the independent Welsh feminist press, has published reprints of Gallie's novels Strike for a Kingdom, The Small Mine, You’re Welcome to Ulster and Travels with a Duchess.

Notes

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  1. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  2. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  3. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  4. ^ John 2011, p. vii.
  5. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  6. ^ John 2011, p. viii.
  7. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  8. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  9. ^ Sharpe 1998.
  10. ^ Sharpe 1998.
  11. ^ Sharpe 1998.
  12. ^ Sharpe 1998.
  13. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  14. ^ Gallie recalled that '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".' See section Menna Gallie
  15. ^ Jenkins 2016.
  16. ^ Smith 2011.
  17. ^ "Strike for a Kingdom". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  18. ^ Jenkins 2020.
  19. ^ "Man's Desiring". Kirkus Book Reviews 1 February 1960. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  20. ^ "The Small Mine". Honno Press. Archived from the original on 5 December 2014. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  21. ^ Gallie 2011.

References

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Archives

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