Romance on the edge of Europe

A major retrospective of the Welsh-born artist Gwen John: Strange Beauties at the National Museum Cardiff in the first half of 2026 assembled rarely-seen work from the archives of the National Museum in Cardiff and galleries worldwide. In an in-depth, wide-ranging essay in O’r Pedwar Gwynt (Wales), Marc Edwards asks the reader to consider John’s oeuvre from many angles. Edwards questions the curator’s tendency to ‘pedestalise’ the artist as ‘a feminist icon’, suggesting she was a far more complex character than such a label would allow.

On the one hand, John was radically independent, placed her art at the centre of her world, and refused marriage and children. She was one of the first women to train at the Slade School of Art in London. Her female figures refuse objectification. On the other hand, John was inextricably tethered to her brother Augustus John and practically enslaved to sculptor Auguste Rodin, who according to Edwards, used her emotionally, sexually and artistically. She also depended on him financially.

There are almost two thousand letters from John to Rodin held in the Musée Rodin in Paris. We must consider the ‘dark possibility’, says Edwards, that ‘her relationship with Rodin was necessary to her genius’. A picture emerges of an artist driven by competing passions: for her art, for erotic love (with men and women), and for God. From these contradictions emerge transcendent portraits of women often shielded by curtains and layers of clothing.

Was Gwen John a Welsh artist, or British, or European? The Welsh art world is certainly keen to claim her, although art historian Peter Lord remains sceptical. John did not engage emotionally or intellectually with Wales, but also never fully immersed herself into a French identity. Edwards believes that, ultimately, ‘the work was everything to Gwen John – art without boundaries’.

Fictional Wales

On holiday in La Rochelle, Mererid Puw Davies comes across a travel article written by a French writer about Wales. The writer expresses a sense of isolation, of being on the edge of the world. It’s a familiar trope in literature: Wales is often represented as being empty of people, a ‘blank space’. Ironically, this travel piece is about Swansea, a densely populated city. ‘Do we not see, often’, Davies asks, ‘that which we are expecting to see?’

She quotes literary scholar Christina Les, who has studied representations of Wales in European writing: ‘Wales the place therefore seems to be a portal to a certain kind of space, characterised by otherness, liminality and distance’. Fictional characters are often looking to escape a crisis. They are blinded to the world around them, wrapped up in their pain. This is true of the protagonist in Und jeden Morgen das Meer (‘And the sea each morning’) (2018) by Karl-Heinz Ott. In this novel, Aberystwyth is reimagined as ‘Abydyr’, a desolate place seen through the eyes of a grieving widow.

Immersing herself in genre literature from Germany, specifically romance novels set in Wales, Puw Davies encounters a very different country: one full of people and warmth. The protagonists fall in love with those who care ‘for nature, for people, for animals’. These popular stories are full of good food and hospitality as well as traumatic past events. They offer a sunnier vision of Wales. Although they do not offer a wholly accurate representation, the author would rather live in this world than in the loveless desert of Abydyr.

Tourism and sci-fi

Mary-Ann Constantine is on a day trip to Loch Katrine in Scotland, arguably the birthplace of Scottish tourism. She considers the influence of Sir Walter Scott, and his long poem, ‘The Lady of the Lake’, on the development of the tourism industry here. Like Davies, she acknowledges that places like these are ‘a strange mix of fact and fantasy’. Such magical landscapes tend to generate creative work, which in turn shape how the place is experienced.

Loch Katrine had a profound influence on Jules Verne, who visited in 1859. Constantine finds one of his novels in a gift shop, The Underground City, translated from Les Indes Noires (1877). She reads it on a long train journey and is captivated. Verne portrays an underground world built underneath a loch to tap into a coal seam, which both ‘reflects and critiques life on the surface’.

In this world, the workers are happy and safe from the world’s storms. It is a ‘capitalist fantasy’ by an author who subscribed to his society’s utopian ideas about progress, technology, and an obedient workforce.

The field of energy studies is growing in response to the environmental crisis. Constantine looks at the discussion of the history of coal in recent works and reminds us of its relevance to our lives today. ‘We can never be in the heat of the moment’, she reminds us, quoting academic and activist Andreas Malm. We can only be ‘in the heat of this ongoing past’.

Trauma and The Troubles

Liadan Ní Chuinn, the author of Every One Still Here (2025) is a non-binary writer from Belfast, publishing under a pseudonym. They were born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday Agreement, and are too young to remember the bombs, murder, and kidnappings. But the stories live on in public consciousness, Angharad Penrhyn Jones.

This ‘remarkable’ debut of short stories examines questions of intergenerational trauma, grief, silence, and the act of naming. It has taken the literary world by storm with its unflinching accounts of the crimes committed by British Soldiers in Northern Ireland.

Jones contextualises the work within a postcolonial framework. These characters are all grappling with questions of what it means to live in a violent, exploitative world. The author’s anger seems to pulsate on the page. The writing ‘raises moral questions about guilt and complicity,’ says Jones, ‘implying that each one of us is stained, either for committing a crime or refusing to prevent a crime from happening’.