Novel
Traed mewn Cyffion
Kate Roberts · 1936
Synopsis
A family of quarrymen from the north of the country, from 1880 to the Great War. Jane Gruffydd marries a slate quarryman, raises six children in a two-room house and counts every penny. The men go down to the quarry, come back with their lungs ruined, go on strike and lose. The children who do well at school leave to teach elsewhere and do not return. Jane grows old, learns enough English to read an official letter, and discovers what it contains.
Context
The novel appeared in 1936 and follows a single family over more than thirty years, in the village where its author had grown up. It is written in the north-western dialect, which few authors did at the time. Its subject is what respectability costs: one asks for nothing, says nothing, pays. The war arrives in the last third and takes away a son, as it had taken the brother of the woman who writes. The title comes from a Welsh expression that designates feet caught in stocks, the shackle of the pillory. Welsh television drew an adaptation from it.
Who it is for
Three hundred pages in Welsh, translated into English and not into French. The story proceeds through small domestic scenes and, for a long time, almost nothing happens in it.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the greatest Welsh-language novel of the twentieth century, and its author as the finest prose writer in that language.