Dew on the Grass

by Eiluned Lewis

Slight edge wear and slight rubbing to spine. Pages are perfect. Same day shipping.

Genres: Classics, Biography, Memoir, Womens

Paperback

First published January 1, 1934

Reviews

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

This lovely old paperback formed part of my Librarything Virago group secret Santa gift from Jane at Fleurinherworld. It’s a slightly fragile old book with a really nice clear inscription inside – I do love to wonder about the people who have held and loved old books before me. Eiluned Lewis, the author of Dew on the Grass was completely unknown to me – and a bit of a google didn’t reveal much. She is described - by the oracle that is Wikipedia - as having been a Welsh novelist, poet and journalist. Dew on the Grass seems to have been her first published work. I can only assume that this is a very autobiographical novel – which is much less of a straight narrative and more a collection of chronological scenes, memories and vignettes.
I really do enjoy those narratives written for adults about childhood – especially when the childhoods portrayed are those of former times. This is a novel about the magic and innocence of childhood – that all too short time, before more grown up concerns begin to take over. In Dew on the Grass we meet the Gwyn children, Delia, Lucy, Maurice and little Miriam, though it is Lucy who is our eyes and ears, and it is through her we see everything. The place is Pengarth, the time probably the turn of the last century.
“The Rectory children had come to tea and now all of them had run out into the garden and were deciding what game they should play next. Released at length from the spell of Louisa’s eye and the cool, leaf shaped nursery, they danced out on the lawn, shouting, hopping with excitement, ready for something adventurous, scarcely able to contain their glee”
The children are granted a wonderful freedom – roaming through the fields around their home, blackberry picking, playing hide and seek – while acting out the magical adventures and stories that run through their imaginative little heads. Lucy is particularly imaginative – having a whole cast of wonderful characters at her fingertips – and when not concerning herself with their continuing adventures she writes poetry.
In the company of these delightful children, we take a visit to the sea, prepare for the Harvest festival, enjoy haymaking, prepare and perform a play for their mother’s birthday, entertain the rectory children and catch colds. The Gwyn children are generally well behaved children, blissfully unaware how fortunate they are, they are filled with enthusiasm and energy, their small transgressions are pretty minor by today’s standards – they respect and love the adults in their lives, including, their nurse maid Louisa, agricultural worker Davey John and a local tramp for who Lucy secures some bread and treacle. The concerns of these children are innocent, and come from a simpler time, their disappointments, on the whole small ones.
“It was a fact sad, but almost inevitable – that when on winter evenings you painted in the nursery after tea – which was the best time of day since there was no longer any possibility of being dragged out for a walk, or told to do your piano practice – then the pictures, which by lamplight had appeared so fair, wore an altered complexion next morning. Thus when Lucy had coloured, with pride and pleasure, all the illustrations in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ it was disconcerting to find the following day that the Ancient Mariner, instead of
being ‘long and lank and brown as is the ribbed sea sand’ was long and lank purple, with a beard of deep crimson.”
Ultimately, when boarding school beckons for the eldest Gwyn and Rectory child – it heralds a time of change for the younger children, who will now be the eldest left at home. There is a wonderful sense of nostalgia about this engaging little novel, depicting a traditional way of rural life that is gone forever. The world of children and the long, warm summery innocent days spent in the gardens and fields of the Welsh borders are depicted with a deceptive simplicity and affection.
I really must thank Jane for giving me the chance of this charming little discovery; I can’t imagine I would have come across it otherwise. I am sometimes haunted by the idea of all those wonderful out of print books, I may never get to hear about.

[Nicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dew on the Grass is a semi-autobiographical novel reflecting on the author's childhood and her thoughts, feelings and imaginings. It's not a straight narrative in which one thing leads to another, but a chain of memories linked by character and place. It was sweet, and easy to read, and captured some of the bittersweetness of growing up, but it still felt somewhat insubstantial -- perhaps because of my tendency to read books with clear plots that go from A to B.

Katie Gramich's introduction is a good one, helping to contextualise the novel and draw out some of its themes. My only complaint is that this reprint wasn't properly edited -- a correction is put in on a sticker for the introduction, and there are misspellings and misprints throughout the text.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books)]

I like going into novels not knowing a blessed thing about them — not even reading the synopsis on the back cover. That works well much of the time but there are drawbacks. I got a fifth of the way into this one before realizing how exclusively focused it was on the world of children, solely observed by a nine-year-old girl. The writing was great, and the first chapter or so was cute, but I lost interest soon enough. Thus, I did not finish.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Translated by Katie Gramich. In the middle of the book there are some lovely photographs of JM Barrie and Michael Llewelyn Davies playing croquet at Glan Hafren (scroll down to near the bottom of this site http://wikis.lib.ncsu.edu/index.php/E... to see a picture taken at the same party)

I have just been reading The Alone to the Alone, which was based in the Rhondda during 1914-1944, the decline of coal and economic emigration. Now I move further north and onto a woman's view during those same years. Fictional autobiography that I read with a nod towards the first day of spring, and the daffs of a St. David's Day

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Montgomeryshire, also known as Maldwyn (Welsh: Sir Drefaldwyn) is one of thirteen historic counties and a former administrative county of Wales. It is named after one of William the Conqueror's main counsellors, Roger de Montgomerie, who was the 1st Earl of Shrewsbury.

synopsis from amazon - Set in the Welsh borders, this enchanting autobiographical novel vividly evokes the essence of childhood and a vanished way of life through the eyes of nine-year-old Lucy. She describes the great events - haymaking, harvest, a seaside holiday - set against the tapestry of the everyday, the routines of summer and winter with the constant background of the garden outside. And there is the world of the imagination too, the invested heroes and heroines of childhood whose deeds are as important as those of any real person. Eiluned Lewis recaptures this world in a deceptively simple style, bringing to life the whims, terrors and intense feelings of childhood in a way that very few writers have succeeded in doing. This novel was first published in 1934 to great acclaim becoming a bestseller and Book Club Choice.

[Abigail Hartman · Rating 3 out of 5]

REREAD, September 2018: Still a charming story, with an atmosphere rather than a plot. The nostalgia is so rich, it's almost a sad book.

Initial Read, 2011:
A sweet story of a girl's childhood in her Welsh home of Pengarth, on the Welsh Border. The chapters are full of her own imaginings and adventures with her siblings, especially her older sister, Delia, and through her eyes the reader is given a glimpse of the beauty of Wales at the turn of the century. Eiluned Lewis' poetry ("We Who Are Kindred" in particular) is beautiful, and her descriptions rich. The story does have a melancholy end, however, as Lucy's childhood begins to come to an end, and through the book Lucy has very mistaken and strange ideas about God, an element which put me off a little.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 3 out of 5]

My kind of book, for sure. With all the charm of childhood happiness brimming over. And with that sense of "this is a time that will so soon be gone", that tinge of sadness that we can't stay there, in those moments of fullness. Lewis writes with ease and simplicity. I liked it. The one thing is, having read so many childhood memoirs, I don't know what is going to make it stick out in my memory.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eiluned Lewis is one of those wonderful female authors who wrote from the heart about places she knew and loved, and who appears - like so many authors of her generation - to have been unjustly forgotten. First published in 1934, Dew on the Grass tells the autobiographical story of a young girl and her siblings growing up in the Montgomeryshire countryside in Wales. Among Lewis' concerns here are 'gender domesticity, Welsh culture and the rural environment.'

The novel has been reprinted in recent years by Honno, a focused press which focuses on translating works by Welsh women into English, and in bringing neglected novels back for new generations to read. The insightful introduction which accompanies the novel has been written by Katie Gramich, a Professor at Cardiff University. She writes at the outset of the reception of Dew on the Grass, which was 'phenomenally successful' upon its publication, 'attracting positive reviews from literary critics, going rapidly through a number of editions, being translated into several languages, and winning the Gold Medal of the Book Guild for the best novel of the year.' Gramich then goes on to speak of Lewis' own life. I knew next to nothing about the author when I began to read, but feel rather familiar with her after learning about her early life, and the things which inspired her to begin a writing career.

Lewis' focus within Dew on the Grass certainly lies with her child characters. Gramich writes that 'both mother and father are very much background figures in Lewis's fictional world, where the norm, the central consciousness is that of the child.' She goes on to compare Lewis to Dylan Thomas in their use of the child's viewpoint, 'though her work in this mode predates his by several years... Like Thomas's, Lewis's child-world is not pure idyll but a place of imagination and delight hedged around with menace, punishment and disappointment.' Gramich also gives a comparison between Lewis and Katherine Mansfield, one of my all-time favourite authors, which piqued my interest in the novel still further.

Rather than exploring the working class in her novel, as a lot of her contemporaries tended to do, Lewis looks at an upper middle-class family named the Gwyns, who are Anglo-Welsh landed gentry. Nine-year-old Lucy, 'dreamy, accident-prone and acutely alive to the world around her' is the second eldest daughter. She is a thoughtful child, and continually muses about the world around her.

Lewis' prose is described as 'sensuous, evocative and nostalgic', and it often manages to be all of these things at once. Of the house in which Lucy and her family live, for instance, she writes: 'Succeeding generations of farmers and small gentry had added to the house, here a storey and there a room, heedless of symmetry or foundations, so that on starry nights, when the wind rushed... walls rocked, joists groaned and cracks widened ominously in the plaster.' Dew on the Grass is filled with charming and touching details: 'The names of their [the Gwyns'] four children, who grew up at Pengarth, were recorded by a pencilled legend on the stable door of stout oak. It ran "Delia, Lucy, Maurice (in boots), Miriam (barefoot)" - being a memorial of the height of the young Gwyns at the time of this story.'

Movement, particularly with regard to the younger characters, has been captured beautifully: 'Released at length from the spell of Louise's eye and the cool, leafshadowed nursery, they danced out on the lawn, shouting, hopping with excitement, ready for something adventurous, scarcely able to contain their glee.' The natural world of Lewis' novel has been romanticised in the gentlest and loveliest of manners; it never feels overdone or repetitive, and is largely filled with purity and charm.

The structure of Dew on the Grass fits the plot wonderfully. It is made up of a lot of short story-length vignettes, and is overall a rather a quiet, but highly engaging, book. Dew on the Grass is a celebration of Welsh life, and of childhood; it is clear that Lewis' homeland was much cherished by her. Filled with an innocent and nostalgic charm, the novel is quite quaint in some ways, but thought-provoking in others. This forgotten novel certainly presents a bygone way of life, filled with beauty and sheer delight.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charming. This was originally published in 1934 and apparently quite successful then although it subsequently disappeared from view. This edition brought it back into print in 2006 with a new introduction by Katie Gramich, giving the context and history of the author. This is a fictionalised version of the author's Edwardian childhood in a country house near Newtown (now in Powys). The family was comfortably off Anglo-Welsh, i.e. in this case Anglicised Welsh (the mother and grandmother are Welsh speakers but apart from some rhymes and hymns the language is not being passed on to the children). J. M. Barrie was a visitor to the house and there were croquet games and amateur dramatics. In the novel, Lucy is the main character (based on the author), the second child in a family of four.
There is no plot, really: just a series of episodes in childhood, including games, lessons in the schoolroom, harvest, a summer visit to an aunt by the sea, an encounter with a tramp, and so on, with some fleeting awareness of rural poverty and survival strategies such as poaching. The book ends with the older sister and the boy from the rectory going away to school, which is the end of the idyll for them and in some ways for Lucy too.
A nicely produced book in the Honno classics series, including some photographs of the Lewis family and their home (Pengarth in the novel, Glan Hafren in reality). It could however have done with some more thorough proof-reading as there are some strange misprints throughout.

[Jennifer Freitag · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pengarth, a small, remote country farm on the Welsh Border, is the magical childhood home of Lucy Gwyn and her siblings at the turn of the twentieth century. Young, free-spirited, energetic Lucy whirls through her childhood, dancing to the enchanting beat of rural life, seeing a world of springtime and warm summer, harvest-time and bleak winter, not through the eyes of weary adulthood, but through the fresh, excited eyes of a child. This is not a children’s story. This is a story about children, about their rural life in the Welsh Border country, about their magical playtime, about their school and church and interactions with their neighbours. Full to the brim with Welsh beauty, overflowing with the enchantment of a young girl’s imagination, this little book is as sophisticated as it is elfin, a brief and fleeting chronicle of childhood, its beauty made almost painful by its very brevity. This is a magical little story of a Welsh girl's childhood for all ages, for the child and the child-like.

[Mary Oxendale Spensley · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something about this book I couldn't quite sort out. It has a beauty and a charm that are irresistible, though it's not as profound as The Secret Garden. Even so, I found myself thinking of The Secret Garden often while reading this.

Lucy, based on the author's actual younger self, has a delightfully wild and fantastic imagination, often holding nature in reverent awe. At one point she comes across dried flowers pressed into a book. "They looked brown and dejected, poor things...it was difficult to imagine that these flattened corpses had once blown in the fields or nestled happily under green hedges."

Early on in the novel, we find Lucy contemplating a theological point presented to her one Sunday morning: "To be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and death." This concerns her, as a beloved old horse has recently been put down, and she wonders if the horse's demise was due to her being carnally minded, and if perhaps, had the horse been more spiritually minded, she might have lived longer.

Although this novel never goes so far as to satirize religion, young Lucy does "christen" the pigs, giving each one a pretty name. Of course, this little girl is kept at home, and doesn't have a vocabulary that would include another word for naming someone.

Lucy comes from an affluent family with stand offish parents who rarely, and then only briefly, impact her life. She is raised by Louisa, a harsh servant, whom Lucy doesn't dare to resent. Her chief counselor is her older sister, who cooperates in her imaginary dramas, all quite humorous, but definitely within the bounds of their monied class. She has a younger brother who dearly wants to play with dolls, and she agrees with him that it's easy to imagine he isn't a boy, that instead he is a girl, therefore no rule exists that forbids him from playing with dolls.

Although there isn't a strong plot, my attention was held by potentially dangerous situations that Lucy often gets into. She innocently befriends poachers on her father's grounds, and at one point meets an intruder whom her brother calls a "tramp." "What right 'ave you got to call me names, I'd like ter know, if an honest man can't get work? ...'Aven't I walked all the way from Cardiff?" Lucy is horrified by the state of his shoes, and minutes later his grimy feet, and hopes to give him a pair of her father's, but her brother convinces her this would be a bad idea.

This passage is the only bit that comes close to social commentary. For the most part, this author seems unwilling to examine class differences, although this novel was published in 1934, at a time when serious authors were exploring that particular form of injustice. Even so, because of the antics of this highly intelligent and imaginative child, this novel is well worth the read.

[Ivan Monckton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ignore the disingenuous blurb. Yes, this IS a book about childhood in Wales, and yes, it does cover aspects of the natural world, but, it really should be made clear that this is about the children of an extremely wealthy family in a country mansion with endless servants, whose own lives are considered far too unimportant to mention, and whose parents, apparently, rearely have anything to do with them. Autobiographical to the point of barely being fiction at all. Posh tosh, and really not worthy of an academic introduction.