How Green Was My Valley

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Towards the end of the novel, Huw’s world had become significantly different and smaller, and the reader is brought back to the present time where Huw is himself preparing to leave for an unspecified destination.

Like me he was obviously proud of his Welsh heritage, so I’m not sure why he had to dress it up in any other way.Huw is the youngest son in a large family and a lot of the book covers his brothers and sisters and their loves and heartbreaks as they come of age and marry and leave home. And I wonder how much he came in contact with Welsh Nonconformism, because the chapel was a part of his story but it definitely didn't have the same effect I see even in more modern Welsh work like Emyr Humphreys'. The author had claimed that he based the book on his own experiences but this was found to be untrue after his death; Llewellyn was English-born and spent little time in Wales, though he was of Welsh descent.

And due to this, despite the myriad of characters that go in and and out of Huw’s life, it is easy to tell them apart after some time. Although as an older and more critical reader I do somewhat understand those reviewers who have found Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley perhaps not quite nitty gritty and harshly descriptive enough with regard to showing and presenting what life used to be like in the mining towns of Wales, personally, I still have to admit that rereading How Green Was My Valley for the first time since I totally devoured this novel when we read it for school in 1982 has been in every way as much of a pleasure now as it had been then. Gradually however I found myself thinking about several others who featured in other earlier periods of my life, my childhood friends from primary school, the ones I had at boarding school, at university, and most of all, my family.The original print run also included a glossary covering Welsh words and terms at the end of the book. Huw had earlier remarked on how Dada had a hard time accepting the new ways things are done, even though he understood that the fundamentals of the old and the new are not necessarily different.

And so I can't rate the book very high, because that would be like recommending it, which I don't really. There are electrifying passages, scintillating sentences, and all this time, there is a certain music in the background, a slow buzzing that means something.

Appreciated the Guide to Pronunciation of Welsh names that’s in the back of the book, even though it was only somewhat helpful. Growing up in a small coal mining town in South Wales, the youngest of a raft of five brothers and three sisters, Huw Morgan believed life would always be the same. I’ve just finished this and was completely absorbed, it’s a great story of place and family and the developing unions were fascinating. Ivor Morgan, Huw's eldest brother, marries Bronwen, sides with the father against the strike, defends Angharad against Iestyn Evans' initial familiarity.

Both the film and the book were based on the verities of real life in that period in Wales when the wealthy mine owners controlled the lives of men who had to go down into unsafe and filthy coal mines for little pay and great hazard. Favorite Quote: The man is made of stone who will see a woman in her tears and keep voice and hands to himself.BUT, it just felt so incredibly slow for most of the book, and I found the self righteousness of the characters (and of the time) to grow stale and repetitive. There are plenty of lovely moments in the story—from Huw winning a prize as a child to getting his very first suit; older brother Ivor getting a chance to meet the queen (I’ll leave you to find out for what), to even simple pleasures like Huw taken by Mr Gruffydd the preacher to see the first daffodils when he is ill. A classic of working-class literature, it reminded me in parts of “ The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists” and, while distressing quite a lot of the time, is very well worth reading. As the industrial revolution transformed Britain, the coal-mining regions of South Wales fairly basked in prosperity.