Menna Gallie

Who was Menna Gallie?

Menna Patricia Humphreys Gallie was a Welsh novelist and translator.

She was born in Ystradgynlais, and attended Swansea University, where she met the philosopher W. B. Gallie. They were married in 1940, and had a son and a daughter. Both were politically active, with a commitment to democratic socialism.

She is best known for her novels in the English language, and as the translator of Caradog Prichard's Un Nos Ola Leuad, under the title Full Moon.

One reviewer commented on her "characteristically robust humor." Another said "Menna Gallie, a sort of Welsh Edna O'Brien, writes beady-eyed, bawdy-tongued entertainments calculated to stir recognition in women and discomfiture in men."

Her first novel Strike for a Kingdom is "both an engrossing detective novel and a social panorama of a small Welsh village during the 1926 General Strike". It was reprinted by Honno, the Welsh Women's Press, in 2003, with an introduction by Angela John. It was dramatised by BBC Radio 4 in 2012. by Diana Griffiths

Man's Desiring was described by a reviewer as a novel with "warm and winning ways" a gentle comedy of contrasts about a Welsh man and an English woman at a Midlands university.