Turf or Stone

A forced wedding in a freezing country church, where the only sound is the bride's tears: so starts Mary Bicknor's life of misery with brutish Easter Probert, groom to the oddly assorted Kilminster family. In a tale of passion, violence, cruelty and unexpected tenderness, Margiad Evans conjures a tempestous and sometimes sinister world of rural and small-town border life in the early twentieth century.

Margiad Evans (Peggy Whistler) was born in Uxbridge in 1909, and lived in the Border area in Ross- on-Wye. She adopted the Welsh nom de plume, Margiad Evans, out of a sense of identity with Wales. She attended Hereford School of Art, but writing soon displaced art as her primary work. In addition to Country Dance (1932), her novels include The Wooden Doctor (1933), Turf or Stone (1934) and Creed (1936). She also wrote numerous articles and short stories, and two collections of poetry, Poems from Obscurity (1947) and A Candle Ahead (1956). Her Autobiography was published in 1943 and A Ray of Darkness, an account of her experience of epilepsy, appeared in 1952. She died in 1958.