Jill

Jill was first published in 1884 and enjoyed considerable success at the time, despite pushing the boundaries of Victorian prudery. Now, with an introduction by Kirsti Bohata, it is published again in Honnos Welsh Womens Classics series and is still fresh and surprising so many years later. Amy Dillwyn is known already as an unconventional woman for her time. She took over her fathers bankrupt spelter works and returned it to solvency. She supported striking seamstresses and womens emancipation. She dressed in mannish clothes and smoked a pipe. She believed that the gentry had no right to spend their days in self-indulgent leisure ... But Kirsti Bohata reveals in her introduction another side to this fascinating Victorian that Amy Dillwyn suffered for many years an unrequited love for her friend and distant relative through marriage, Olive. It was a strong and deep love that Dillwyn never publicly expressed, though she referred to Olive in her diaries as her wife. In Jill, Dillwyn created a character whose love for her distant relative Kitty is agonised over and repressed and, given the revelations of Dillwyns diaries, the novel can be regarded as one of her most autobiographical, and as an early expression of lesbian love. Jill is the story of a rebellious and independent young girl growing up without love and warmth as the offspring of a cold and detached mother and a self-absorbed, hedonistic father. Jill comes to despise all signs of human warmth and sympathy. She feels no love for anyone. Her parents inhabit the privileged world of the nineteenth-century gentry a world which Jill, even as a child, fights against; a world that confines women and girls to the role of ladies and all the restrictions that entails. In her bid to escape the confines of her own class and that of a satisfyingly awful stepmother, the heroine launches herself with outrageous self-confidence and blithe disregard for others into the world of the serving classes. The beautiful, proud Kitty becomes her employer, and their travelling adventures provide for moments of physical and emotional closeness that seem almost to break through Kittys rigid pride. It is Jills love for Kitty that is pivotal in awakening the heroine to an emotional sphere to which she had previously thought herself immune. In becoming emotionally vulnerable, Jill experiences her first awakening of conscience. But always present in this book is the insurmountable division of class. In posing as a travelling maid in order to support herself, Jill has become invisible to Kitty. She performs a function and that is all. Amy Dillwyn was without doubt ahead of her time in refuting some of the injustices and inequalities she saw around her, but the twenty-first-century reader is constantly amazed by the depths of the class divisions portrayed in Jill and the careless acceptance of such inequalities. This is a novel of humour and somewhat sardonic wit, of colourful characters without any Dickensian sentimentality. It is an adventure story, but it is also a story of how love and admiration for an inspirational person can be transformative. Lucy Walter It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgment should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council. Gellir defnyddio'r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru. -- Welsh Books Council