“He Made a Woman—”

Marjorie Bowen

Marjorie Bowen is one of the many pseudonyms of Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long (1885–1952), an extraordinarily prolific British writer who published well over a hundred novels, short story collections and works of non-fiction in her various guises. Like Mary Webb, she was an important writer in her time who has now largely fallen into obscurity. Grahame Greene, author of Brighton Rock , Our Man in Havana and many other modern literary classics, named Bowen as a decisive influence on his early writing. Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle were among her other admirers.

‘“He Made a Woman—”’ from Bowen’s 1923 volume of stories Seeing Life focuses on the woods and myths of Wales, specifically Feryllwg, an ancient forest between the Wye and Severn rivers roughly equivalent to the Forest of Dean. While the Forest of Dean is today located in England, just across the border in Gloucestershire, in Bowen’s story it is most definitely in Wales. Bowen’s tale appears to draw on Lady Charlotte Guest’s Victorian translation of The Mabinogion , a collection of the early narratives of Wales, written in Middle Welsh. In her extensive commentary on this important text, Guest suggests that Feryllwg “at one time formed a part of one of the five divisions of Wales” with the name “‘Gwent Coch yn y Dena’, or the Red Gwent in the Deans”. Behind Bowen’s mystical but ominous tale is the story of Blodeuwedd, “flower-face” in the Welsh (and also spelled Blodeuedd). Blodeuwedd was created by magicians to be the wife of Llew Llaw Gyffes, one of the great heroes of Welsh legend. Bowen blends traditional aspects of the Welsh myth with elements of science fiction and a touch of psychoanalysis; imagine The Mabinogion rewritten by H. G. Wells and then rewritten again by a disciple of Sigmund Freud. It is a curious but haunting tale that captures something of the sensuality of woodland.