Hilda Vaughan

Hilda Campbell Vaughan (married name Morgan, 12 June 1892 – 4 November 1985) was a Welsh novelist and short story writer writing in English.

[2] Vaughan was educated privately, and remained at home until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, after which she served in a Red Cross hospital and for the Women's Land Army in Breconshire and Radnorshire.

[6] In 1926, Vaughan gave birth to the couple's second child, Roger, who became a librarian at the House of Lords Library.

[1] Vaughan's later novels – The Curtain Rises (1935), Harvest Home (1936), The Fair Woman (1942), Pardon and Peace (1945) and The Candle and the Light (1954) – were also received well, but with less fervour.

An exception to the more muted success was the novella A Thing of Nought (1934; revised edition 1948), which returns to some of the same themes as The Battle to the Weak.

Her final piece was an introduction to Thomas Traherne's Centuries, published in 1960, in which she offers an account of her religious faith in terms that are described as "quasi-mystical".

[1] Hilda Vaughan died on 4 November 1985 at a nursing home in Putney, London, and was buried at Dyserth, Radnorshire.

[14][16] Gustav Felix Adam's Three Contemporary Anglo-Welsh Novelists: Jack Jones, Rhys Davies and Hilda Vaughan (1950) was the last critical analysis of her work for some time and not entirely complimentary.

[17] In Glyn Jones's The Dragon Has Two Tongues (1968), considered a seminal analysis of the tradition of Welsh literature in English, Vaughan gains only one mention, as one of those who "write about the squirearchy and its anglicized capers.

He remarks, "Her claims to be remembered... are two: first [that] she extended the English regional novel to the "Southern Marches", the land [known as] rhwng Gwy a Hafren; secondly, that in doing so, she made a significant addition to Anglo-Welsh writing.