Margiad Evans, pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler Biography

British novelist and poet, born in Uxbridge, London, to English parents of Welsh descent. Between 1920 and 1936 she lived at Bridstow, near Ross-on-Wye; following her marriage in 1940 she moved to Llangarron, near Ross, and later to Gloucestershire and Sussex. Her work is permeated with an awareness of her Welsh ancestry and a love of the Welsh Border country to which she felt she belonged. Her first novel, Country Dance (1932), was the story of a woman forced to choose between two lovers, one Welsh, the other English. Written in the form of a journal, it was followed by other idiosyncratic and poetic works, including The Wooden Doctor (1933), Turf or Stone (1934), and Creed (1936), each of which expresses, in one degree or another, the author's concern with human suffering and with man's relationship to God; each includes passages of lyrical and intense writing about love and sex as well as those depicting more violent passions. Her journals and essays were published in Autobiography (1943); short stories were collected in The Old and the Young (1948), and verse in Poems from Obscurity (1947) and A Candle Ahead (1956). In her second autobiographical work, A Ray of Darkness (1952), she wrote movingly and courageously about the onset of her epilepsy and her search for religious belief.