literary landscapes
Writers and artists are urged into playfulness and creativity by the beauty and tranquility of the coastline and valleys of The South Hams in South Devon.
Irish Impressionist artist and writer Jack Butler Yeats and his wife, Cottie, a Devon-born artist herself, lived in the secluded, untouched Gara Valley between Strete & Slapton where they were visited by his brother, W. B. Yeats.
Poet Laureate & author John Masefield stayed with them often. J.B. Yeats & Masefield shared a passion for tales of piracy, the sea, & nature. Many of Masefield’s poems are dedicated to Yeats, some are dedicated to The Gara Brook itself. Masefield’s children’s novel, Jim Davis, a tale of highwaymen, smugglers & derring-do is set around Blackpool Sands.
J.M. Synge (Playboy of The Western World), a key figure along with WB Yeats and Lady Gregory in the Irish literary renaissance, visited the Yeats family in Devon.
On the fringes of Bloomsbury, Beryl de Zoete owned a cottage in The Gara Valley in the twentieth century. Beryl was a writer, dance ethnologist & critic, orientalist, traveller & translator who had reputedly belly-danced for the King of Morocco.
Beryl lived with her partner, Arthur Waley, the translator of Chinese and Japanese poetry and a close friend of T.S. Eliot, in Gordon Square near the Woolfs. Like many of her Bloomsbury peers, they 'lived in Squares and loved in triangles'.
Beryl was Oxford educated, independent minded, multilingual & a trained ballerina. She was friends with the Elmhirsts of Dartington Hall, near Totnes, and helped establish their experimental School of Dance. In the Thirties, Beryl facilitated bringing Jewish dancers to Dartington Hall from Europe.
A writer, dance critic for national newspapers & dance ethnographer, she travelled alone when it was not usual, working with Walter Spies in documenting Balinese dancing in Indonesia.
As well as being the first translator of Italo Svevo’s novels, Beryl wrote too; her Dance and Magic Drama in Ceylon is still the key text on Sri Lankan dance.
Other Local Writers
Michael Morpurgo has written extensively about Devon events and landscapes in his novels. Adolphus Tips is set around Slapton during Operation Tiger when the area was given six weeks to evacuate in 1943 before being used by British and American troops, using live ammunition, to rehearse for the D-Day landings.
AA Milne owned a holiday cottage behind Blackpool Sands. Poet Alice Oswald writes in the Dart Valley. And above the Dart at Greenway, Agatha Christie wrote many of her detective novels.
