Caradoc Evans

Who was Caradoc Evans?

David Caradoc Evans, was a Welsh story writer, novelist and playwright. Caradoc met and later married the Countess Helene Marguerite Barcynska, who wrote romantic novels under the name Oliver Sandys. His first wife, Rose Jesse petitioned for divorce in 1932.

Evans was brought up in a Welsh-speaking community in Rhydlewis, Cardiganshire, and although he learned English at school and always wrote in English his work is influenced by Welsh syntax and vocabulary in a similar way to the way Lewis Grassic Gibbon's work in Scotland was influenced by Scots. Evans left school at 14 and worked throughout Wales in a series of menial jobs before turning to journalism.

His first work of fiction was a series of short stories called My People, published by Andrew Melrose in 1915. It may be compared with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and James Joyce's Dubliners. In tone, however, this work is closer to The House with the Green Shutters by George Douglas Brown.

Evans wished to shock the Welsh out of their complacency and smugness by contrasting the pieties of non-conformist Christianity with the brutal realities of poverty, meanness and hypocrisy he had personally experienced.