Turf or Stone

By Margiad Evans

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parthian Books
• Release date: May 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781908069283

Margiad Evans

Novelist, essayist, poet and writer of short stories, with a lifelong identification with the Welsh border country, Margiad Evans – the pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler (1909-1958) – was one of the most remarkable women writers of the mid-twentieth century. She published four novels and was known for her brilliant descriptions of the natural world.

Reviews for Turf or Stone

[shanaqui_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What I've read of Margiad Evans' work all has elements of the gothic. The story here isn't that dissimilar to the story in Country Dance, although it's much less about the interplay of Welsh and English. Still, it's an unfortunate woman torn between two men, and one of the two is cruel to her.

Mary is a different sort of person to the protagonist of Country Dance, though: she brings her troubles on herself to a greater extent. Not that anyone deserves domestic abuse, etc, or that she seems to have had much choice about her marriage to begin with -- but she does choose to take a lover. We spent more of Turf or Stone focusing on the other characters, particularly the abusive husband, which was somewhat surprising.

There's also a surprising moment of hope at the end, which I wasn't expecting: Mary goes to court and the outcome is that she and her child are allowed to leave Easter, her husband.