My People Stories of the Peasantry of West Wales

A respected member of the chapel, Zion, pronounces his wife mad and confines her to the hayloft. A man rides to the April fair to buy a heifer without blemish and acquire a wife. And God appears in a dream to a lonely farmhand, and tells him to dig for a talent under a ruined hut. These short stories depict the poverty and hardship endured by the peasants of west Wales in the Nineteenth Century. But they also reveal the meanness and cruelty of lives lived in ignorance, caught between the desire for love and the fear of violence, and oppressed by the dark power of the chapel minister and the idol he represents. First published in 1915, to great outrage and great acclaim, they retain their timeless quality as classics and their power to shock.