itibaren Kishorpur, West Bengal 721458, India itibaren Kishorpur, West Bengal 721458, India

Rhys Davies wrote over a hundred short stories in his lifetime. Finding the prospect of dipping into those rather daunting, I picked up this little volume, which contains six of his short stories from a couple of different collections. The title story, "Nightgown", had been mentioned in the lecture on him, so I was quite interested. He's an intriguing figure to me: a closeted homosexual born in the Rhondda valley into an environment that was strongly influenced by the chapels and by the hypermasculinity of the miners. He wrote mainly about women and their experiences in that sort of environment, according to my lecturer, and "Nightgown" and "The Last Struggle", in this volume, epitomise that. I think he wrote fairly sensitively about the role of women. The position of the men is less well explored -- not so much about what made them the way they were, though there was plenty there to push them in that direction (the previous generation, the chapel, the mines themselves)... Reminds me of the idea that feminism ultimately benefits the whole of society, because if the women had been less repressed, then so would their sons have been. I don't know if I want to tackle the collected works of Rhys Davies, but I'm going to read his first novel, The Withered Root, and perhaps see if there are any small, manageable collections of his work in the library.