The World of Kate Roberts: Selected Stories, 1925-1981

by Kate Roberts, Joseph P. Clancy (Translator)

Kate Roberts (1891-1985) was the foremost twentieth-century prose writer in the Welsh language. She produced a considerable body of fiction, seven novels and novellas and nine collections of short stories, and was active in the Welsh Nationalist Party as a publisher and a literary and political journalist. A contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and Sherwood Anderson, she created the modern form of the short story in Welsh, and through six decades of writing earned a place with this century's masters of the genre. The World of Kate Roberts offers in English a large selection of stories, many previously, untranslated, that span her long writing career. Joseph P. Clancy's translations convey the intensity, the insight, and the distinctive prose style with which this Welsh-language writer illuminates her characters' often heroic ordinary lives. This book contains twenty-seven short stories, two short novels, and "Tea in the Heather," eight linked stories of childhood in North Wales at the turn of the century. Excerpts from her autobiography provide background for the non-Welsh reader and an Introduction presents Kate Roberts' life and work largely through her own words. The experience of poverty is the vital center of Kate Roberts' material poverty in the slate-quarrying villages of North Wales and the coal-mining communities in the south at the turn of the century and during the Depression; and the cultural, moral, and spiritual poverty of contemporary life in a small town. This poverty defines the experiences and tests the resources of her characters. Her concern was to record, to examine, and to celebrate without sentimentality the life of the close-knit society in which she had grown up. What is most characteristically Welsh in Roberts' vision is that fellowship, membership in a community, is essential to the realization of the human self. "We never saw riches," observed Kate Roberts, "but we had riches that no one can take away from us, the riches of a language and a culture."

Genres: Literature

372 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Kate Roberts was one of the foremost Welsh-language authors of the twentieth century. Known as Brenhines ein llên ("The queen of our literature"), she is known mainly for her short stories, but she also wrote novels. Roberts was also a prominent Welsh nationalist.

Roberts was born in the village of Rhosgadfan, Caernarfonshire (Gwynedd today) where her father (Owen Roberts) was a quarryman in the local slate quarries. She graduated in Welsh at the University College of Wales, Bangor and then trained as a teacher. She then taught in various schools in South Wales.

An early member of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, it was at their meetings that she met Morris T. Williams, whom she married in 1928. Williams was a printer, and eventually they bought the printing and publishing house Gwasg Gee, Denbigh, and moved to live in the town in 1935. The press published books, pamphlets and the Welsh-language weekly Y Faner, for which Roberts wrote regularly. After her husband's death in 1946 she carried on working the press for another ten years.

She remained in Denbigh after her retirement and died in 1985.

It was the death of her brother in the First World War that led Roberts to writing. She used her literary work as a means of coming to terms with her loss.
Her first volume of short stories appeared in 1925 O Gors y Bryniau ("From the Swamp of the Hills") but perhaps her most successful book of short stories is Te yn y Grug ("Tea in the Heather") (1959), a series of stories about children. As well as short stories Roberts also wrote novels, perhaps her most famous being Traed mewn Cyffion ("Feet in Chains") (1936) which reflected the hard life of a slate quarrying family. In 1960 she published Y Lôn Wen, a volume of autobiography.

Most of her novels and short stories have as a background about the region where she lived in north Wales. She herself said that she derived the material for her work, "from the society in which I was brought up, a poor society in an age poverty ... it was always a struggle against poverty. But notice that the characters haven't reached the bottom of that poverty, they are struggling against it, afraid of it." Her work deals with the uneventful lives of humble people and how they deal with difficulties and disillusionments.

Her work is remarkable for the richness of her language and for her perception. The role of women in society and progressive ideas about life and love are major themes in her work.
She also struck up a literary relationship with Saunders Lewis which they maintained over a period of forty years through the medium of letters. These letters give us a picture of life in Wales during the period and the comments of these two literary giants on events at home and abroad.

Many of her works have been translated into other languages.