Allen Raine: soft-power rebel, part 1

March this year, I had the privilege to give a talk at Blaenannerch Chapel to a group of people participating in the project ‘Allen Raine: The Opera?‘ by Rowan O’Neill, funded by the Arts Council of Wales and the Lottery. Over the course of half a year, people from the Tresaith and Aberporth communities and surrounding area are creating a sort of community opera inspired by the novels and short stories of Allen Raine. While the author’s name used to hold quite a bit of currency in the English-speaking world a little over a hundred years ago, these days it’s largely Welsh writing in English aficionados and locals who not only have a bit of knowledge about the author, leave alone have read one or two of her many books. To help her project participants along in their Raine journey, Rowan invited me to come to Blaenannerch and give a talk about the author, her link with the locality and why music was and is so important to unlocking her stories.

The essay below is based on the first part my talk ‘Allen Raine: The Radical?’ (click here to listen to a recording from the evening) and will also cover some additional material that I didn’t mention on the occasion. In this first of eventually three parts in this series, I am focusing on the life of Ada Puddicombe. In the second part, I give an overview of Allen Raine’s works and set them in context of her own life.

A portrait of the writer as a young girl: family and childhood

Allen Raine was born as Anne Adaliza Evans in Newcastle Emlyn on 6 October 1836. She was the first of eventually four children of her mother, Letitia Grace (born Morgan) and her father, Benjamin Evans, a local solicitor. She and her siblings (John, Lettie, and Thomas) grew up in a comfortable and comparatively privileged household thanks to their father’s profession as well as their prominent ancestral background on both parents’ sides. Through her mother, Ada (as her family called her) was the great-granddaughter of the Methodist preacher Daniel Rowland, Llangeitho, and on her father’s side the Unitarian minister David Davies, Castellhywel. While she spent the majority of her childhood in Newcastle Emlyn, virtually every summer the family retreated to a rented accommodation in Aberporth to enjoy several weeks of the south-Cardiganshire sea side. These annual visits laid the foundation for Ada’s life-long connection with the communities of Aberport and Tresaith.

The Unitarian family background in her childhood and later youth was most likely one of the main influences on her no-nonsense outlook on life and also her somewhat studied and reserved approach towards faith and religion. Not only is this reflected in her later literary writing, but also in some of her private and public statements regarding religion, especially the perpetual rivalry between Anglicanism and Methodism in Wales. This Unitarian background was also most certainly important when her parents eventually decided not to continue her education at home in Wales. Instead of enrolling her in a local school, they sent her and her sister into private education in England. This decision had originated following the unexpected death of a girl in the neighbourhood and Ada‘s mother‘s fear that the child‘s death was brought about by unfavourable conditions in the girls school in Carmarthen. Further, while it is not entirely certain just how strong the Unitarian family background loomed over Ada’s childhood, it appears to have been significant enough when it came to identifying suitable educators. As a result, Ada and her younger sister, Lettie, were going to spent their following years in Cheltenham and Wandsworth under the care of Rebecca and Henry Solly.

Educating Ada: the Solly years

Henry Solly was a Unitarian minister and somewhat of a radical and rebel against the established order not just in British society in general, but even within his own church. Most notably, he contributed to the foundation of Working Men’s Clubs, the Garden City movement and the Charity Organisation Society. He also supported the Chartist movement, was an outspoken member of the anti-slavery movement, dappled in the co-op movement and supported universal suffrage. Name a radical social and political cause and you are sure to find the name Henry Solly attached to it. However, as is to be expected of a young man with ideas, a determined mind, but little inherited wealth, he struggled to support himself and his growing family even though he was gainfully employed, albeit on a small income, as a Unitarian minister. Thanks to his good connections with other influential Unitarians, which also included Elizabeth Gaskell, and an equally enterprising wife, the Sollies found ways to improve their financial situation. While Rebecca would take on young pupils to contribute to their joint income from at home, Henry would travel the country delivering public lectures on literature, religion and society, and contributed to several journals.

By the year 1849, Ada and Lettie therefore not only found themselves as the latest additions to Rebecca’s home school in Cheltenham (a metropolis in comparison to sleepy Newcastle Emlyn), but also as new members of an extremely ethically-minded household. Aside from the above-mentioned causes that Henry supported, he also went the extra-mile in in his approach to religion and religious service. For example, Henry did not entirely agree with the appellation “Unitarian”, stating that Jews and Muslims have as much right to the name. Henry may not have been Ada’s main teacher, as that lay firmly within Rebecca’s duty, however, when looking at her later literary explorations of faith, her writings clearly reflect a certain removed and bemused point of view. While sympathetic to various denominations, Allen Raine suffered no fools and mindless (and heartless!) followers of religious doctrine. Perhaps this is owed to a sense of being a Unitarian outsider in a sea of Methodists and Anglicans; perhaps this is owed to Henry’s influence on a young girl, demonstrating by his own example that ministry is as much a matter of the rational mind as it is of the heart.

In addition to the general radicalism of the Sollies, Ada also found herself in an extremely literary-minded household. As mentioned, Henry toured the country giving lectures on ethical and religious topics and frequently ventured into the world of literary criticism. He was acquainted with Charles Dickens and the aforementioned Elizabeth Gaskell and also counted George Elliot among his personal contacts. During his years in Cheltenham (1848-51) he also welcomed Charles Kingsley who was in town giving a series of Temperance lectures. While there are no immediate traces in neither Henry’s autobiographical writing nor in Ada’s later literary outputs, the overall exposure to the world of literature and literary criticism no doubt sharpened her aesthetic sense for the written word as well as gave her an insight into the tricky world of publishing.

Ada and Lettie rounded out their education in the care of the Sollies in Wandsworth to where they had moved by 1852. In the mid-nineteenth century, Wandsworth then was still a very rural location and much more removed than Cheltenham. The move had been precipitated by a personal family tragedy which Henry describes in his autobiography in 1893, published before Allen Raine made her own debut as a novelist. Incidentally, this is also the only time where he refers to Ada and Lettie, albeit without naming them.

“Early in the year 1851 a great terrible sorrow fell on us in the death of our first-born, our eldest little darling, who was carried off by scarlet fever. […] Our little one was within a month of her eighth birthday, a singularly lovely and attractive child. We had much tender loving sympathy, personal and by letters. Thank God, non or our other children caught the infection, and my wife’s pupils had all been sent home on the first alarm. The latter consisted of the two young daughters of Mr Benjamin Evans, of Newcastle Emlyn, solicitor and clerk to the magistrates of that district, and two daughters of Mrs and Mrs Towgood of Bath.”

‘These eighty years’; or, The story of an unfinished life

Following the move to Wandsworth and finishing her formal education, Ada received her parents’ permission to stay another summer and explore nearby London more thoroughly. She spent her time visiting galleries and participating in social life before it was time to return as an accomplished, ‘finished’ young lady back home to rural Wales. The main question was now, what is an accomplished young lady to do in a sleepy little Welsh town with all her education, musical skills and acquaintance with writers and intellectuals in the big city?

Ada’s adulthood: Wales, England and Wales again

The answer was: not much, really. On her return to Wales, Ada mostly divided her time between her parents’ house in Newcastle Emlyn and in the rented summer cottages at Aberport and Tresaith. Even though she busied herself and dappled somewhat in literary writing with her contributions to her friends’ small and short-lived journal Home Sunshine, her days were largely filled with the polite idleness of an unmarried middle-class woman. During this time, she first met Beynon Puddicombe, Middlesex banker and distant relation of family friends at Newcastle Emlyn. Their courtship could be described as a slow-burn, developing during his frequent visits to the area over about ten years before they eventually married in Penbryn Church in 1872. Shortly after the wedding they moved to Addiscombe near Croydon where Beynon had taken a post as the foreign correspondent for a bank. (As a aside, I am not certain whether this Beynon Puddicombe is in fact the minor artist known for his miniature ink-drawings, but if he is, then he clearly also showed artistic sensibilities that would match some of the Italian interests of his future wife.)

If Ada’s life had been filled with polite idleness before her marriage, the removal from her circle of friends and the comparative freedom with which she moved at home now disappeared with the relocation to England. Shortly after the move, her health was in decline and she became frail and bed-bound for over a decade. Her biographer Sally Roberts-Jones believes that this was possibly a psychosomatic reaction as the result of the limitations placed on her as a middle-class, childless, married woman. For sure, her contemporary Amy Dillwyn (1845-1935) is another prominent case who made similar experiences (though obviously not the married bit) and who, too, wrote her way out of socially enforced boredom and back to a modicum of health. Writing became some sort of occupational therapy, even though initially Beynon did not take Ada’s writing seriously and indulged her activity as some inconsequential hobby.

Despite Ada’s poor health, she and Beynon continued their habitual summer visits to Wales. So often did they return to Tresaith that they eventually decided to commission the construction of a summer holiday home which they named ‘Bronmor’. Around the time that Ada’s literary star began to rise in the mid-1890s, Beynon’s mental health began to deteriorate to the point that he took early retirement from his position at the bank. He received a generous pension and he and Ada removed from near London to remote and rural Tresaith. Beynon never recovered his health. He spent some time with a personal carer in a special home in north Wales until that, too, could no longer be supported owing to occasional spells of violence towards his surroundings. He and his carer returned to Bronmor where Ada would look after him throughout most of the day, except for two hours every day that she devoted entirely to her literary work. They would both enjoy the coastal outdoors without ever venturing far from their house, apart from those occasions where Ada in her public persona as The Author would be invited for public functions as far as Aberystwyth or the more nearby Newcastle Emlyn. A lover of animals, she had a pet squirrel and kept two donkeys in her garden, but refused to ride the poor dears. As for her daily two hours of writing, she engaged the help of at least one personal secretary and amanuensis. She composed her novels at rapid speed, habitually dictating her ideas to her secretary in order to make most of the little time she had available for herself and her work.

Beynon died on 29 May 1906 and was buried in the graveyard of Penbryn church where he and Ada had been married almost thirty years before. Around the same time, Ada experienced the first symptoms of breast cancer to which she succumbed two years later on 21 June 1908. She was buried in the same grave as Beynon.

When the news of Allen Raine’s death broke, the tributes to her came pouring in from far and wide. Among them, Owen Rhoscomyl was perhaps one of her more unexpected admirers, considering the bent and content of his own literary output and general outlook on life. Less surprising, however, was a tribute paid by Cranogwen, practically a neighbour, in a public meeting of the Temperance movement in Cardigan in which she was saddened by the loss of ‘a great genius who had passed away from their midst‘.

The final two years of her life, Ada revisited some of her previously abandoned stories and fleshed them out into full-length novels. The final one though, Under the Thatch, she never saw through to publication and it was her nephew, Lyn Evans, who finished the novel without credit.

Sources

• Solly, Henry. ‘These Eighty Years;’ or: the Story of an Unfinished Life. 2 vols. London and Croydon: 1893.
• Roberts [Jones], Sally. Allen Raine. Series: Writers of Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1979.
• Jenkins, David. ‘PUDDICOMBE, ANNE ADALISA (‘Allen Raine’; 1836 – 1908), novelist.’ Dictionary of Welsh Biography. Retrieved 8 Jul 2024, from https://biography.wales/article/s-PUDD-ADA-1836
• Raine, Allen. Queen of the Rushes. 1906. London: Hutchinson & Co.