A ray of darkness

by Margiad Evans

191 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

"Margiad Evans" was the pseudonym of Peggy Eileen Whistler, an English poet, novelist, and illustrator with a lifelong fascination with the Welsh border country

Reviews

[Katharine Harding · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book for neurology book club. It is not an easy read but I found the effort paid off. It's the autobiography of Margiad Evans, who was in her early 40s in the 1950s when she had a seizure and was then diagnosed with epilepsy. Her descriptions of her symptoms were fascinating and unusually detailed. She also had other symptoms that with a modern medical viewpoint are suggestive of a tumour (which is sadly what she had) and would have definitely got her an MRI scan nowadays.

There is a lot of extensive writing where she is trying to make sense of her situation through nature writing, mysticism and poetry. I hope this was helpful for her to understand what was going on for her, but this was the part that was quite difficult to read at times. I'm still not sure I quite understood what she meant by egoism.

Finally, it was interesting to hear that she was treated at the Burden Neurological Institute in Bristol! This is still going. I didn't know it had quite such a long history.