Ellen Hughes

Miss Ellen Hughes, Llanengan

For the Australian doctor and council alderman, see Ellen Kent Hughes. For the American ice hockey player, see Ellen Weinberg-Hughes.

Ellen Hughes (1867–1927) was a Welsh-language writer, temperance reformer and suffragist from Llanengan in North Wales.^[1][2]

Strongly influenced by Sarah Jane Rees, she had a poem published in the Welsh-language women's periodical Y Frythones in 1885, when she was only 18.^[3] The year 1907 saw the publication of the essay Angylion yr Aelwyd (Angels in the Home) which she had written in 1899. Now a member of the Undeb Dirwestol Merched y De (UDMD), the South Wales Women's Temperance Union, her article criticized men's arguments for keeping women out of parliament.^[4] The same year she also published Murmur y Gragen. Sef detholion o gyfansoddiadau barddonol a rhyddiaethol (Murmur of the Shell: Selection of Poetry and Prose).^[5]

In her A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales (1899), Jane Aaron describes Hughes as "arguably the Welsh-language author of the period who comes closest to being a feminist in the modern sense". Covering her contributions to the journal Y Gymraes (The Welsh Woman) in 1900, she quotes a passage in which Hughes mocks William Gladstone, the prime minister of the day: "The idea that an elder of the wisdom of Mr Gladstone should doubt the capacity of the majority of women to vote in an election strikes us as wonderfully astonishing!".^[6]

Selected works

• Hughes, Ellen (1885). Sibrwd yr awel, sef Cyfansoddiadau barddonol. Robert Owen.
• Hughes, Ellen (1907). Murmur Y Gragen. Sef Detholion O Gyfansoddiadau Barddonol a Rhyddiaethol. Dolgellau.

References

1. Koch, John T. (2006). Celtic Culture: Aberdeen breviary-celticism. ABC-CLIO. pp. 1787–. ISBN 978-1-85109-440-0.
2. "HUGHES, ELLEN (1862 - 1927), poet, essayist, lecturer, preacher, temperance campaigner | Dictionary of Welsh Biography". biography.wales. Retrieved 22 July 2024.
3. Aaron, Jane (2010). Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity. University of Wales Press. pp. 133–. ISBN 978-0-7083-2287-1.
4. John, Angela (2011). Our Mother's Land: Chapters in Welsh Women's History, 1830-1939. University of Wales Press. pp. 184–. ISBN 978-1-78316-287-1.
5. Hughes, Ellen (1907). Murmur y Gragen. E.W. Evans.
6. Deininger, Michelle. "Book Review: Legacies of Recuperation: Feminism, Suffrage and the New Woman in the Honno Classics Series". The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies. Archived from the original on 7 October 2016.