Welsh Journals

Wife to Mr Everyman Grace Rhys:-Authoress and Anthologist TL ALTHOUGH MUCH is known of Ernest Rhys, the brilliant founder of the Everyman Library Series, which brought so much of classic literature within the financial scope of millions of readers,-comparatively little is known of the life and work of his wife-Grace Rhys. Of Ernest Rhys it here suffices to say that he was a Welshman associated largely with Carmarthenshire, a poet of no mean accomplishment, and one who performed for his fellow-men a task of inestimable benefit to them, and in his wife he was fortunate to find a talented companion who shared his love for the literature of the Celt, and who after an initial diffidence proved herself an ardent and expressive writer in her own particular field. Few marriages in the literary world, perhaps, have proved so mutually sympathetic and happily constructive, and this fortunate union came about through a chance meeting in 1890 of the young, intelligent Welshman and the charming and sensitive Irish girl, at an evening party given by William Butler Yeats at Bedford Park. At that time Yeats himself was climbing the difficult path to fame;-a dark, intense young man who seemed to live in a mental world of his own peopled by the heroes, gods and fairies of Western Ireland! It was an age of great literary endeavour in which many of our now most famous writers were young and struggling, and it was amongst many of these aspiring geniuses that Grace and her two sisters found themselves when they first came from Ireland to teach in London:-the family fortunes having declined through the extravagances of their erratic but lovable father, Bennet Little,-a hard-riding and somewhat eccentric Squire of Co. Roscommon. Between the young couple it seems to have been a case of love at first sight. Some months later on the summit of Cader Idris they pledged their troth, and soon afterwards were married at Hampstead,-a district in which they later lived for many years. It was indeed a 'marriage of true minds', and the difficulties of the early days only strengthened the bond which bound them spiritually so closely together. At first the young couple lived in a cottage at Gaenen Hir in a remote part of the Dee valley near Llangollen, and it was most probably there that Grace Rhys first learnt to fully appreciate the charm of the Welsh tongue