Bicultural Geographies: Narrating Anglo-Welsh Identities in the Novels of Allen Raine

Around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Anne Adaliza Puddicombe (1836- 1908) from Newcastle Emlyn rose to international fame under her pseudonym Allen Raine as one of the four most widely published authors of her time. Even with her popularity, the predictability of her stories and idiosyncratic portrayal of rural characters attracted much disparaging criticism almost from the start. However, Raine’s strategic employment of geography as a narrative device for the portrayal of an inherently bicultural Victorian Wales has gone entirely unnoticed. Despite her focus on Ceredigion, the sum of Raine’s settings classify as border areas. In the first and most concrete category of border narratives, Raine explores the effects of national borders. Owing to her focus on the Anglicising effects on the gwerin, this border-crossing frequently relates, but is not limited to migration between a rural Wales and urban England. In the second type of dividing spaces, shore dwelling or lives spent on the sea draw attention to the geographical equivalents of social spaces as they represent means of inclusion into and exclusion from life in a community. In these instances, Raine uses naturally existing border features to convey the invisible and artificially created boundaries of society between a Welsh-speaking peasantry and the Anglophone gentry. The third border experience concerns the correlation between time and space. This category illustrates the conflicts that arise from crossing the invisible border between a rural Wales that signifies the connection of the gwerin to their quasi-mythological past and the urban, industrial, Anglicized Wales that represents the future of the national community and addresses the potential danger of losing one’s cultural heritage. Therefore, it can be argued that Raine counter-balances her formulaic plots and simplistic characters with a consistent relation of Anglo-Welsh identities to threshold geographies.