![]() I sometimes wonder how she would have felt as she waded into the River Ouse with her pockets full of stones if someone had told her that the canon-makers of the late twentieth century would be spoiled for choice as far as she was concerned. ![]() She did so partly out of a deep-rooted anxiety about the reception of her own fiction: her final nervous breakdown was partly attributable to her fear that her latest novel Between the Actswas not as strong as her earlier work. This, along with the gender inequalities embedded in the literary canon, was an issue she worried her way around in almost all her critical essays. I would agree with Virginia Woolf that we cannot really measure the artistic success of a work produced in our own lifetime. It ushers in a whole host of men, for one thing (some of them deserving, some less so), and for another, it raises questions of quality which can only be answered in the fullness of time. I am not sure I like the word ‘great’, not when it is used in the same sentence as the ‘novel’, anyway. ![]() Francesca Rhydderch reviews Tywyll Heno by Kate Roberts as part of a Wales Arts Review series searching for the ‘Greatest Welsh Novel’. ![]()
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