Menna Gallie

Menna Patricia Humphreys Gallie (18 March 1919 – 17 June 1990) was a Welsh-speaking Welsh novelist, translator and public speaker. She was a life-long Labour Party activist. But she rejected feminism because she felt that it was ideologically hidebound. And she was cool towards what she perceived as 'the more insistent parts' of its second-wave. Gallie 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

Menna Patricia Humphreys was born in the mining village of Ystradgynlais[1], 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.[1] She came from a Welsh-speaking family, which on her mother's side was socialist.[2] 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; and her uncle attended Ruskin College Oxford before becoming a Labour Party County Councillor.[1] Gallie was a life-long Labour Party activist.[3] She rejected feminism because she felt that it was ideologically hidebound.[4] And she was cool towards what she perceived as 'the more insistent parts' of its second-wave.[5]

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, who she married. From 1940 to 1990, while Gallie lived in Wales, she gave numerous talks and lectures, mainly in the community, outside academia.[6]

Married life

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[1], after which he left with the rank of Major and having been awarded the Croix de Guerre[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.[1] Gallie and her husband were politically active, with a commitment to democratic socialism.[7]

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.[7] 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.[7] While 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.[7] While they were there Gallie wrote a critical review of Germaine Greer's 1970 book, The Female Eunuch, which was published in Volume 92 (2199:49-50) of the Cambridge Review[8]. In it, on page 50, Gallie took issue with her summation of Greer's conclusion that ‘Man is the enemy; so is the family and so is marriage’ by citing 'For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love', the first line of the poem The Canonization, by John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet.[9] In 1976, her husband retired and they settled in Newport, a village in Pembrokeshire, on the coast of Cardigan Bay.[1]

Literary career

While in Northern Ireland, and at the age of 40[10], Gallie began her literary career with the publication of her first novel, Strike for a Kingdom[11] (1959).[12] Soon afterwards she wrote two novels in quick succession, Man’s Desiring[13] (1960), a campus novel, and The Small Mine[14] (1962), an industrial novel.

Gallie wrote two novels about Northern Ireland. Travels with a Duchess[15] (1968) was partly inspired by her visit to Dubrovnik in the former Yugoslavia (now Croatia) as the Northern Ireland representative at a Pen (Poets, Essayists, Novelists) International conference. You’re Welcome to Ulster[16] (1970) drew upon Gallie's experience there as an active member of its Labour Party.

Gallie found Cambridge 'pretentious and hostile to women.'[1] Consequently, she was not inspired to write a novel about it. Instead, she wrote her 1986 novel These Promiscuous Parts[17] about South West Wales. And she produced the first English translation of the Welsh-language novel Un Nos Ola Leuad, Full moon[18], by Caradog Prichard.

Reviews, dramatizations and reprints

Strike for a Kingdom[11], originally 1959, was shortlisted for a Gold Dagger Award. In his review, Welsh historian Dai Smith described it as 'both an engrossing detective novel and a social panorama of Cilhendre, a small Welsh village during the 1926 General Strike'[19]. In 2012 the novel was dramatized by BBC Radio 4[20] by Welsh author and dramatist Diana Griffiths. In 2020 it was reviewed by John Perrott Jenkins.[21] In 2024 four CUROP (Cardiff University Research Opportunites Placement Scheme) students drew upon Strike for a Kingdom to create their artwork Motive and Opportunity.

A reviewer described Man's Desiring[13] (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.[22]

The Small Mine [14] (1962) tells the tale of a young collier's death in an industrial accident in Cilhendre, which featured in Strike for a Kingdom. In 2004 it was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 by Diana Griffiths.

Travels with a Duchess[15] (1968) documents the holiday of a menopausal wife from Cardiff in former Yugoslavia which the narrator retrospectively described as 'a terrible chronicle of debauchery.'[15]

Tributes

In 2005 Welsh historian Professor Angela John gave the Annual Lecture of the Women's Archive of Wales on the subject of Place, Politics, and History: the life and novels of Menna Gallie at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. In 2006 Llafur hosted a day school in Ystradgynlais to examine the life and work of Gallie.[23] In 2011 Dai Smith included Gallie's Strike for a Kingdom in one of his 2011 top 10 alternatives to Dylan Thomas.

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Jenkins 2016.
  2. ^ John 2011.
  3. ^ John 2011, p. viii.
  4. ^ Jenkins 2021, p. 80, originally 2017.
  5. ^ Jenkins 2021, p. 80, originally 2017.
  6. ^ National Library of Wales.
  7. ^ a b c d e Sharpe 1998.
  8. ^ Sherbo 1999
  9. ^ Jenkins 2021, p. 119, originally 2017.
  10. ^ 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".'
  11. ^ a b Gallie 2011a.
  12. ^ Strike for a Kingdom is featured in the Literacy Atlas, an interactive online atlas of English-language novels set in Wales, see here.
  13. ^ a b Gallie 1960.
  14. ^ a b Gallie 2000.
  15. ^ a b c Gallie 2011b.
  16. ^ Gallie 2010.
  17. ^ Gallie 1986.
  18. ^ Prichard 1973.
  19. ^ Smith 2011.
  20. ^ "Strike for a Kingdom". BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  21. ^ Jenkins 2020.
  22. ^ "Man's Desiring". Kirkus Book Reviews 1 February 1960. Retrieved 15 August 2012.
  23. ^ Ward 2007.

References

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