I look at two stories of twentieth-century working-class lives this month - Raymond Williams's 1960 novel, Border Country , and Dorothy Whipple's High Wages . Williams explore the lives of a family living in a small rural community on the borders of Wales and England, and Whipple looks at the challenges faced by an ambitious shop assistant in a Lancashire town. Border Country , Raymond Williams (Chatto & Windus, 1960) The borders in Raymond Williams’s fine novel are geographic, emotional, social and existential. Geographically, it is situated in the Welsh marches in Glynmawr, a fictitious Welsh village so close to England its inhabitants can nip over for a drink on Sundays, when pubs in Wales are closed. The characters also cross other borders: Matthew Price, son of a working class couple, was brought up in Glynmawr but is now a university lecturer living in London. Summoned to his father’s sick bed, he returns to his home country, where he finds the dissonance between ...

My selections for this month are two wonderful novels which, though set in very different milieus, both explore themes of marriage, family and powerlessness: Feet in Chains by Kate Roberts, translated by Katie Gramich (Parthian, 2021, first published as Traed Mewn Cyffion , 1936); and They Were Sisters, Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Books, 2005, first published 1943). Feet in Chains , Kate Roberts, Translated by Katie Gramich (Parthian, 2021, first published as Traed Mewn Cyffion , 1936) Feet in Chains tells the story of Jane and Ifan Gruffydd as they struggle to keep body and soul together on their small holding near Caernarfon, and raise their three daughters and three sons. Ifan is a quarryman, at the mercy of powerful employers who can lower wages or increase hours at will. But it isn’t only economics that drives their unjust treatment of their workers: favouritism and old grudges also play a part. At the start of the novel, the couple are just married. Jane is a showily dr...