Welsh Women's Classics: Creed

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Cyhoeddwyd Creed , pedwaredd nofel Margiad Evans yn 1936. Gosodir y stori yn Chepsford, tref ddiwydiannol, ddychmygol ger ffin Cymru a Lloegr lle mae meddwdod a ffraeo yn ddigwyddiadau nodweddiadol. Pwnc y nofel yw dioddefaint, gyda bywyd teuluaidd yn cael ei ansefydlogi gan farn gref am gariad a phechod, a syniadau am grefydd a ffawd yn destunau dadleuon angerddol.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

Creed was published in 1936 and was Margiad Evans's fourth and final novel. Set in Chepsford, a fictional industrial Border town characterised by drunkenness and brawls, it takes suffering as its subject matter. Domestic life is unsettled by strong opinions on love and sin, while notions of religion and fate are debated with passionate intensity.

Dosbarthu

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Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

Novelist, essayist, poet and writer of short stories, with a lifelong identification with the Welsh border country, Margiad Evans – the pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler (1909-1958) - was one of the most remarkable women writers of the mid-twentieth century. She had published four novels and was known for her brilliant descriptions of the natural world.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

This final novel by Margiad Evans is an extraordinarily passionate and intense piece. The tortured love affair, which is one of its strands, was inspired by Emily Bronte’s work and, as with Bronte’s moor, the landscape is very much a character in the novel. Creed is set in the semi-rural slum district of a border town whose ugly vitality (and terrible weather) surrounds and colours the action. Creed is a story of unrelenting pain and isolation. All the main characters are thought-tormented by their inherited faith, their past crimes, present obsessions or physical fears. The only fairly comfortable characters are those who live in the upper town: John Bridges and his mistress (though somewhat socially isolated) enjoy a life not only of material comfort but also one not haunted by the fear of God – a fear which drives Bridges’ clerk, Dollbright, almost to madness. Dollbright is the central character and readers first encounter him at his most judgemental. He curses Rev. Morriss as a blasphemer. Later, Morriss describes him as ‘a wild enemy to us and to our century, with the primitive strength to condemn’. Dollbright’s total lack of human sympathy, his contempt and hatred for other men, expose his ‘faith’ as unchristian, but his human weakness and redeeming feature is his love for his wife. This conflict drives him close to suicide, but finally to a kind of freedom and humanity. The opening of the novel, Ifor Morriss’s extraordinary sermon, asserts the redemption of all, however sinful, through God’s presence in every soul. This could be seen as special pleading by a flawed priest but is rather played out as a true revelation at the heart of the novel. Creed depicts almost unendurable suffering and, in one character, it is totally self-inflicted: Gwen Trouncer is drawn as vile in every way, a living nightmare, but ultimately there is pity even for her. The language of the novel is as extreme as its emotions and sometimes it is definitely over the top, but its almost surreal vitality is a result of trying to depict states of mind far beyond verbal expression. Dollbright, feeling suicidal, runs home in the dusk: ‘He felt he was running down an open throat, that he could not bear it if the sky too closed upon his eyes and squeezed him between two meeting masses. […] He had no hearth in his thought.’ The author is well aware how far from most of her readers this world is, and every now and then she breaks the conventions of narration to assert her presence, her personal knowledge of such a place and the truth that only fiction can tell. Of the ‘dregs’ of society she depicts, she also says, ‘What are the dregs if they are not the essence of the whole’. She sometimes struggled to depict the mental states of that essence but, for all its excesses, in Creed she produced a powerful and compelling work.