Under Storm's Wing

Description

This text collects: all that Helen Thomas wrote about the poet Edward Thomas; the volumes "As It Was" and "World Without End"; her letters to Edward; and separate memoirs of her meetings with W.H. Davies, D.H. Lawrence, Ivor Gurney, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost and W.H. Hudson. The book has been assembled by Myfanwy, Edward's and Helen's youngest daughter. She includes her own account of childhood with her father, and his death at the Battle of Arras in 1917. She adds an appendix of six letters from Robert Frost to Edward Thomas. Helen wrote "As It Was", the story of her courtship and early marriage, shortly after Edward's death, and "World Without End" a few years later. In the original editions and later reprints fictitious names were used for the protagonists. In this edition the actual names are restored.

Helen Thomas married Edward Thomas (1878-1917) in 1899. In order to support his family, Edward became a prolific writer of essays, introductions, reviews, biographies, and studies of the English and Welsh countryside. Thomas's meeting with Robert Frost in 1913 was the catalyst for his turning to poetry. His first collection was published in 1917, six months after his death in the Arras offensive. Helen was untiring in her efforts to make his work known, and lived to see it firmly established in the cannon of English poetry. They had three children, of whom Myfanwy (b.1910) is the youngest.