Ellen Hughes

Ellen Hughes (1867–1927) was a Welsh-language writer, temperance reformer and suffragist from Llanengan in North Wales.

[1][2] Strongly influenced by Sarah Jane Rees, she had a poem published in the Welsh-language women's periodical Y Frythones in 1885, when she was only 18.

Sef detholion o gyfansoddiadau barddonol a rhyddiaethol (Murmur of the Shell: Selection of Poetry and Prose).

[5] In her A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales (1899), Jane Aaron describes Hughes as "arguably the Welsh-language author of the period who comes closest to being a feminist in the modern sense".

Covering her contributions to the journal Y Gymraes (The Welsh Woman) in 1900, she quotes a passage in which Hughes mocks William Gladstone, the prime minister of the day: "The idea that an elder of the wisdom of Mr Gladstone should doubt the capacity of the majority of women to vote in an election strikes us as wonderfully astonishing!".