Rhapsody

by Dorothy Edwards

The ten stories of Rhapsody, together with the three previously uncollected pieces added to this edition, are utterly distinctive in voice and sensibility. At least three of the Rhapsody stories - 'A Country House', 'Days', and the brilliant, allusive and enigmatic 'A Garland of Earth' - are small masterpieces. Not bad by the age of twenty-four. All of them are extremely controlled studies of constrained desire, loneliness and incomplete relationships for which Edwards was developing a non-realist world of imagery and symbolism and her own language. Music is one of the motifs. For Edwards, music represents art, but also the possibility of sexual passion which is otherwise largely unstated but is everywhere a powerful undercurrent.

'I can't think of a more wonderful collection of stories than Rhapsody by Dorothy Edwards. It's a card-carrying masterpiece. Funny, creepy, and strangely beautiful.' Dan Rhodes

Dorothy Edwards was born in 1903 in Ogmore Vale, a small mining community in Mid Glamorgan. After a scholarship to Howell's School for Girls, Llandaf, she took a degree at Cardiff University in Greek and Philosophy, but literature was her passion and soon after graduating her short stories began to appear in magazines and journals. These were collected in Rhapsody(1927). Her novel Winter Sonata(1928) followed shortly afterwards. After a brief period spent living in London with acquaintances from the Bloomsbury circle, Edwards committed suicide on a Cardiff railway line in 1934.