Dorothy Edwards

Dorothy Edwards, an only child, was born on the 18th August 1902 at Ogmore Vale in Glamorgan.

Her father was a headmaster and an early activist in the Independent Labour Party. At age 9 Dorothy, dressed in red, welcomed Keir Hardy on to the stage at Tonypandy during the national coal strike of 1912. She was taught that revolution was at hand, that class barriers would be a thing of the past.

 

Dorothy won a scholarship and boarded at Howell's School for Girls in Llandaff before moving to University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire where she read Greek and philosophy.

Her early hopes to be an opera singer were set to one side after graduating and the death of her father. Instead she took on part-time work to supplement her mother’s pension with whom she now lived.

Dorothy managed to write a number of short stories which appeared in the literary journals of the day. She spent several months with her mother in Vienna, all the time revising or writing before embarking on ‘Winter Sonata’, a short novel published in 1928.

Introductions to several members of the Bloomsbury Group meant a move to London and a division of her time between child-care for the family of Bloomsbury author David Garnett and the promise of an advance payment for her work on a new volume of stories.

However, Dorothy’s life was starting to spiral out of control; she was attracted to the Welsh nationalist movement but felt that her Welsh provincialism made her, in London at least, feel socially inferior. Leaving her mother dependent on a hired companion consumed her with guilt as did the end of an affair with a married musician.

On the 5th January 1934, having spent the morning burning her papers, Dorothy Edwards threw herself in front of a train near Caerphilly railway station. 

Her suicide note read: "I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life. I have accepted kindness and friendship and even love without gratitude, and given nothing in return."

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