After another unplanned absence of longer than I'd care to calculate, we are finally back again with another instalment of the 30-day book challenge. I'd like to say that I have been too busy spending my time at home productively to write blog posts, but the truth is that my strategy for surviving quarantine has been to divorce myself from reality as much as possible. Also, I recently got back into playing The Sims, so that's taken up a sizeable chunk of time as well.
So you might be thinking that it's a little bold of me to suggest anyone read a certain book given that I have been spending my time recently dissociating and playing The Sims 4 (not as good as Sims 2 or 3, sadly - that's a topic for another post), but the 30-day book challenge decreed that today's post should be about 'a book that you wish more people had read', and so I must obey.
With all that out of the way, the book I have chosen for this prompt is The Wooden Doctor by Margiad Evans.
A summary of the book's plot, copied from Honno Press, is as follows:
First published in 1933, this is the story of Arabella, an adolescent girl who is obsessed with her doctor. From a childhood blighted by a violent, alcoholic father, Arabella grows up into a passionate young woman impatient of any restraints. Misunderstood by all around her, she is desperate for the security and peace she associates with the young Irish doctor and she develops a strange illness which she likens to a fox inside her, biting and tearing her flesh. Her condition, it seems, is incurable.
Despite its intriguing premise, The Wooden Doctor is not a famous book. Outside of the sphere of Anglo-Welsh literature, within which Margiad Evans is perhaps relatively well-known, few people seem to have even heard of her - let alone be familiar with this book, the second of her four novels. While her first novel, Country Dance, has been republished recently as part of Parthian's Library of Wales series, to my knowledge Honno Press is the only publisher currently releasing copies of The Wooden Doctor. Honno Press themselves are a small, independent women's press that focuses on publishing books by women with a connection to Wales, such as Evans. They have published their edition of The Wooden Doctor as part of their Honno Classics series - a decision I am forever grateful for, as if they hadn't done so I might never have had the opportunity to read this wonderful book.
And The Wooden Doctor is, in my opinion, a wonderful book. It's intense, gothic, and emotionally powerful, such that it might have been studied alongside such greats of the literary canon as Jane Eyre in an alternate universe. But in this universe, Margiad Evans and her works are tragically little-known.
In my final year of university, I chose to write about The Wooden Doctor and Country Dance for my dissertation. Whenever anyone asked me what I was writing about, they inevitably looked blank at the mention of Margiad Evans (except, thankfully, my dissertation supervisor). The one place where I could reliably find people who not only knew of her but had read her work was at a conference for Welsh writing in English, where I was able to meet some of the academics who have worked hard to analyse and promote the work of Evans, like Kirsti Bohata and Katie Gramich.
That said, I don't want anyone reading this to think that Margiad Evans is an author who only has value from an academic perspective. On the contrary, I think her work is very accessible and should be able to appeal to a much broader audience than she is currently known to. This is one of the reasons why I wish more people would read The Wooden Doctor: because I feel there are so many people out there who would love the novel, but they just haven't come across it yet.
From a selfish perspective, too, I wish more people had read The Wooden Doctor. I would be overjoyed to have more people to discuss the themes of Evans' work with, and it would be nice if more people could read my dissertation within the context of having read the two books it's about (beyond its current readers of just me and my supervisor, that is).
Ultimately, though, I wish more people had read The Wooden Doctor because I think it's a criminally underrated book that deserves more readers. It's a powerful story about trauma, desire, and the things we hold inside of ourselves. I believe that there are many, many people out there who could find something in it to relate to, who are just waiting to discover this unjustly-hidden gem.
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Editing note: If you're thinking the font of this post looks weird or irregular, you're correct. Something went wrong during the editing process and I haven't yet been able to fix it. So... sorry about that.
An interesting post and it would be great if more people would read it.
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