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- Herausgeber: Honno Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Serie: Welsh Women's Classics
- Sprache: Englisch
This autobiographical account from a courageous young novelist and poet of great promise, silenced too soon, is an enlightening example of writing on the experience of terminal illness.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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A RAY OF DARKNESS
by MARGIAD EVANS
with an introduction by Jim Pratt
WELSH WOMEN’S CLASSICS
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
A Ray of Darkness: Perception after 70 years
Julie Thompson-Dobkin
Margiad Evans (1909-1958) was a writer living with epilepsy. I was introduced to her writings by a colleague and friend, Dr. Steven Schachter of Harvard University. Since then, I have become an avid reader of her work, and am able to appreciate her writings through a unique lens. I am a neurologist, a mother of a child with complex partial epilepsy, and a professional advocating for the use of art as an alternative means of communication for people with epilepsy. These are individuals who find words a challenge when explaining their seizure experiences. With her ability to ‘paint with words’, Evans has dispelled my long-held view that it is not possible to express the reality of these lived experiences through a written narrative. Her works provide another creative platform (along with the visual arts and music) to characterize the truths of this condition.
A Ray of Darkness, although oxymoronic in nature, is an appropriate title to describe Evans’ life and unrelenting journey. (Ray: A straight line extending from a point in one direction only: a glance; sight; perception: a moral or intellectual light or gleam of such light). The book’s original vii publication was in 1952, as Evans began a new epoch in her life, dominated by intractable epilepsy, and facing a future that she could never have foreseen. Poetically and with vivid detail, A Ray of Darkness delves into the illusive nature of her epilepsy, the bizarre neurological semiology of the seizure experience, and her desire to understand, from both a religious and philosophical perspective, the role she played in the development of her condition:
Yet I began to see that I was not free, that I was indeed in chains to my brain, and even hopelessly and despairingly involved with it and I began to ask: ‘Is epilepsy a religious or a moral disease? Is it possible that it is my ‘fault?’ (p. 100)
Throughout the book, one can sense Evans’ fear that her ability to write is being slowly stripped away. Yet in A Ray of Darkness, she has masterfully presented an intimate, tormenting journey that captivates the reader:
The story of my epilepsy then is given here as an adventure of body and mind […] There is no teaching, no philosophy and no comfort intended in it. It is the truth, most of it exactly as it was written down at the time, for I have my diaries. (p. 12)
One cannot help but surmise that epilepsy was a catalyst to some of this work. Her hypergraphical recordings of experiences are perhaps manifestations of her seizure complex, leading to a powerful mixture of long narratives, random thoughts written in her diary, and poetry, all in an effort to capture a single moment in time: viii
With the attempt at creative and critical writing the fatal voluminousness began again. I could in no way control the ideas which streamed in upon me as if from the outermost circle of my universe. […] But in trying to put this understanding into words I merely reproduced more circles of my own. (p. 98)
Although written 70 years ago, Evans explores many issues which individuals with epilepsy today consider as being more disabling than the seizure experience itself: namely, stigma and discrimination; societal perception at witnessing a convulsive seizure; a loss of independence; fears of pregnancy and motherhood; and the many side effects of anticonvulsant medications: ‘my brain remained awake and was often actively meditating within a body that was like a stone in the sun’ (p. 111).
Evans has proven herself to be an exceptional writer, able poetically to integrate the elusiveness and psychosocial consequences of epilepsy with clarity and detail: her Ray of Darkness is a tour de force which can (and should) be used to foster understanding of the lived seizure experience. Indeed, her writing demands a deeper analysis of this creative genius, since these accounts have become her legacy: a ray to connect her experience to ours.
Language is demanded by epilepsy, as by poetry, that simply does not exist […] wordless language within from which mental and spiritual discovery issues. It can suggest truths which are the more certain for being inarticulate […] Why this ray of darkness on me while it is day? To teach me death? Compassion? That it has done and for that, if I have lived ix wrongly, to bring this disease, I would praise the disease, for to understand grief is beyond the understanding and the committing of art – even if a person’s art is the only way he can think of God’s self (pp. 169 and 187).
The scar is not on the brain but on the heart: For disease goes very far towards ‘Truth’ (p. 160).
California, July 2020
Dr. Julie Thompson-Dobkin is the Founder of the Hidden Truths Project: The Art of Epilepsy
INTRODUCTION
Jim Pratt
We go home separately Sian.
Strangest of all changes, that you have one door,I another!1
Although written 70 years ago, A Ray of Darkness remains among the most relevant of Margiad Evans’ autobiographical works. Not only does it vividly portray the harrowing evisceration of a literary career as the spectre of epilepsy is confirmed, but it describes in words what few sufferers of that disease have managed: the real and intimate portrait of an epileptic fit.
Under the circumstances of being a young, virile and optimistic writer suddenly afflicted by a recurring prospect of gradual physical and mental destruction, Margiad manages to retain some semblance of hope as she searches for the cause of her affliction. She hoped the book would have value to clinicians’ attempts to understand and alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy. To an extent it did, referenced fourteen times in the standard textbook of the time, written in North America by the world expert of the disease who subsequently became her friend. Since then, with the development of new drugs and better understanding of the pathology of the brain, the therapeutic aspects of A Ray of Darkness have largely been forgotten. As the foreword shows, there is much of value xii hidden within its pages expressing, in words, what is lost to most sufferers: the ability to describe a fit.
The book has literary value, too. Structured through a sequence of unfolding sagas, the reader is compelled to follow a narrative that exposes Margiad’s state of mind when faced with the reality of a disaster that threatened her, her husband and her unborn child. She worried lest her succinct and easy writing style was confused by the illness. Describing the changes that followed her initiation, on May 11th 1950, into epilepsy, she notes:
On May 22nd I had begun to write and rewrite my book on Emily Brontë […] My hope was that through the darkness which had befallen me I might see her more clearly. But it was not to be so […] I could in no way control the ideas which streamed in upon me as if from the outermost circle of my universe. They came as if from all points and could not be focused upon the figure of the woman I was seeking to interpret, herself universal. I felt that I understood the experience she had undergone, which too was a circle having at its centre, death. But in trying to put this understanding into words I merely reproduced more circles of my own (p. 97-98).
These concerns that her writing had been compromised by her affliction were not born out in the classic and unique pathography which followed, in which her fluency, elegance and imagination are evident on every page. A Ray of Darkness represents a watershed in the life of this young Border writer, triggered by the sudden and devastating onset of epilepsy at the age of forty-one at exactly the moment she found herself to be pregnant and was planning to re-energise her writing career after the upheaval of war.
xiii It is difficult to put this tragedy into proper context without some knowledge of her background, and here it is worth asking how, from a conventional suburban beginning on the outskirts of London, had she become the savante of nature which is the essence of her earlier book Autobiography (1943), and of its introspective successor nine years later, A Ray of Darkness.
Margiad (Peggy Eileen Whistler) was born in March 1909, the second of four children to Katherine Wood (1875-1959) and Godfrey Whistler (1866-1935), known as Pa or Fa. The family lived in Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire and it was presided over by her mother’s mother:
She lived about two miles away up a steep hill with real country cottages on either side and fields and wildflowers and animals beyond the hedges. Granny would arrive at our house and straightaway go and sit with my mother in the nursery. Here I think they discussed the misfortunes of my mother’s marriage, the awful behaviour of her children and the impending Doom of the World. Our Granny now was fat, but it was a tight and disciplined fat, well ordered with bracelets, necklaces, large brooches like padlocks and corsets the bone ends of which showed like studs across her back. Granny wore a blackish hat like a stale cowpat secured to her head by a spotted motoring veil tied under her bottom chin. Sundry hat pins, sort of jungle trophies in the form of teeth, eyes, claws of the greater cats insured the minimum of peril by drought, storms, Act of God, flood or witchcraft.2
Such observations by her younger sister Nancy, remembered ninety years later, would have been shared by Peggy: the two were inseparable and took equal delight in the foibles of others.
xiv By 1916, their father, too old for war service, had slaked his disappointment in whisky and his consequential nervous breakdown stopped his working as an insurance agent in London. His erratic behaviour, and the spirited disobedience of his three daughters all but broke the family up and what had been a household founded on strict, middle-class Edwardian rectitude fragmented as the children were parked out with their numerous relatives while their mother escaped for weeks at a time. Nancy again:
Then in 1916 came Roger: the last and final wrench for by then something awful between my parents had become overt and shocking. Mother took the baby and disappeared while our father took us three to our aunt in Cricklade, Wiltshire. It must have been the end of all love, friendship or affection between them.
As Roger wrote in 1990, ‘If ever a marriage was made between such incompatible people as between our parents, I have yet to encounter it.’ And of his mother he wrote ‘she had an unhappy life with very little love in it.’ As far as he (Roger) was concerned the family breakup lay full square at the feet of his father, whom he remembered, with disdain but also affection, as ‘someone who would neither go to church nor eat porridge, both of which he said he had choked on in his youth.’.
It was as a consequence of the inability of her mother and father to live in harmony that at the age of nine Peggy found herself mesmerised by the River Wye:
One weekend my father, whose continual illness had caused the breaking up of our home, decided, being very depressed, xv to take me along (from Cricklade) for a weekend change to Aunt Fran’s and Uncle Donavan’s farm (Benhall, near Ross on Wye).3 He took me across meadows never seen before, never forgotten since, to the river’s brink; and there on a spot which was in future to be one of ‘our’ magical places, it seemed as if he stood me. He himself looked silently on the wide strong water – for it was autumn and the river running high. After some moments he turned away, expecting me to follow him. I did not. He called. I still looked at the river, some powerful emotion began to rise in me, some desperate adoration. He called again. I turned away and followed him, but when he looked down, when he himself came out of his thoughts, he saw me in a passion of tears. With consternation he stooped, coaxed. What was the matter? All I could sob was: ‘Oh don’t, don’t take me away from this place. Oh Dad can’t I stay here?’4
This single action was to wed the young girl from London suburbia to the Herefordshire landscape for life. Two years later, Margiad (Peggy) and her sister Sian (Nancy) spent an unsupervised year at Benhall away from their fractious family. The love between the two girls and the passion and reverence for nature that was forged during that unforgettable year were to remain with them both throughout their lives and forms the basis of the opening quotation of this introduction, written by Margiad not long before she died in 1958.5 The children had at their disposal 300 acres of a mixed dairy and arable farm set above and on the bank of the River Wye. The buildings were old: red sandstone with rickety roofs, shoddy animal pens, and thick, red mud. The fields were old: girt with hedges and the pastures full of wild flowers. The trees were old: one xvi oak since Doomsday, at its foot they made a place for their dolls. Wildlife flourished in the hedgerows, the pastures and around the old buildings. In summer, the Wye would dry to near a trickle with long, red sloping banks: in winter, a raging torrent. Within the farm the Wells Brook: more secret places. And all theirs.6
Here it is worth considering the crucial contribution made particularly to Margiad by her mother. Katherine (otherwise known as Kit) Whistler was an intellectual, an historian and a cultured pianist. She was patient and practical, holding together a high-spirited, talented and garrulous family in the presence of an alcoholic husband. Although herself often in penury, she shared the financial acumen of her father, on whom she fell back in extremis. When money became available, she was most generous and bought houses or land for all her children, leaving herself virtually homeless. In the end, almost alone, in her eighties and a cancer survivor, she nursed Margiad for two years through her dreadful final bouts of epilepsy and paralysis up to her death. She herself died the following year. It was as if she eked out her life to care for her daughter.
In 1921 when Margiad was twelve, Kit’s father bought a house, Lavender Cottage, for the family not far from Benhall Farm and their connection with Buckinghamshire was broken. Margiad found herself living close to the river that had intoxicated her three years earlier. Lavender Cottage had no electricity, running water or drains. Light came from paraffin lamps or candles, water from a well in the garden, and the sewage was discharged into a cesspit that required emptying. But the views ‘from the bedrooms were lovely. Behind the spire of Ross Church the long low hills of Penyard and Chase xvii and behind them some miles away the perfect symmetry of May Hill with its crown of trees […] Sometimes we would ride our cousins’ ponies up to the tump in the moonlight.’ Their neighbours, the Sextys,
were farmers noted for their wealth and greed. There were four of them: Percy and three middle-aged spinster sisters, Gwen, Nora and Trixie. Percy, Gwen and Nora had all lost their teeth and, false teeth being expensive, they bought only one set, used for smiling (not eating). It was not uncommon to hear the mistakenly toothless bawl of ‘Gwen, Gwen where is Percy? I have to go to Ross and I want the teeth’ […] or so the sisters believed, having as they did vivid imaginations.7
Although Lavender Cottage was a tumultuous unhappy place dominated by their father’s alcoholism and their mother’s penury, it was where Margiad was inspired to write and to publish her novels Country Dance (1932), The WoodenDoctor (1933), Turf or Stone (1934) and Creed (1936). On Christmas Day 1935, their father succumbed to his alcoholism and died, sitting next the fire while waiting for his lunch. The house was sold.
In his study The Withered Branch, D. S. Savage describes her four novels as ‘bitter, passionate cries of protest against the frustrations of personal life’ which yet ‘glow with a dark, sombre passionate light’, and it might not be unreasonable to conclude that their author was of a similar nature.8 But both her sister Nancy and her brother Roger told me that she was, in her normal life, a funny and entertaining companion who was sociable, practical, diligent and very hard working. These assessments are born out in the visitor’s book of ‘SpringhernexviiiGuest-house for English and Continental Residents:proprietors P. & N. Whistler and H. Blackwell,9Bulls Hill,Ross-on-Wye. Equipped with Central Heating, Electric light,Five Bedrooms, & Two Bathrooms, with Garage for ThreeCars. Three Guineas a week. No extras. Long week-end(Friday-Tuesday) Two Guineas inclusive. Special terms forReading Parties’.
Margiad (Peggy), her sister Nancy and their friend Helen Blackwell had opened the guest house near Ross on Wye. A typical entry in the visitors’ book for April 2-5th 1937 from A. M. Ashley reads: “We came, we lingered, we lothfully departed!” Various Blackwells were frequent visitors, including Sir Basil and Christine, owners of the Oxford publishers, and their son Richard (‘worse than his bite’ pencilled opposite his name). ‘Too too wonderful but life always is with Peggy’ wrote another admirer. It is clear from the photographs, sketches and ribald comments that this was an unusual, vibrant establishment where the guests were more like friends and might just as easily join in with the running of the place as go for picnics or put on plays in the garden. The meals were extravagant and luxurious, and the profits minimal. The visitors’ book shows that it remained open right up to the declaration of war in September 1939, after which it closed and Margiad found employment as a housekeeper in two houses in Dorset, which she abominated, and worked for a short while in a munitions factory in Hereford with her sister Nancy, whence they were both fired after a few days for insubordination and recklessness.
In January 1941, with her husband Michael Williams she moved into a farm worker’s cottage, Potacre, in Llangarron five miles from Ross. This was to be a pivotal move in her xix writing career. Potacre had been built in a field on the summit of a ridge in the Welsh Border country, open to the sky in all directions and with views to the Black Mountains 18 miles away. It had no amenities other than a cold tap (which sometimes failed), a chemical loo and a vegetable garden. But its simplicity, isolation and exposure to all the winds that blew from across the mountains of Wales were an inspiration to Margiad and she described, with passion, what she could see, hear and feel, in notebooks, letters and in a seminal book, Autobiography, which marks her out as one of the finest nature writers of her day. In it, she defines the importance of Potacre.
But as this autobiography is the record of my gravest (that is happiest) inner existence, I shall end it with a description of the place where I feel I have reached my uttermost growth. Its meaning to me is the same as the soft touch of the star a long time ago, and it smells through and through of the same old smell as the first turf I lay on – the same old primitive smell of earth’s hide.’10
Writing to her husband about the prospect of moving from Potacre to her modern house, Juniper Cottage, she wrote:
My dearest dearest husband. All over the world there couldn’t be a nicer place to write you than this. I’m on the far bank and it’s hot and cloudy. Rabbit hills around, […] the sound of the stream and the breathing of the trees and leaves. Crickets in the bush are like cogwheels, and a Jay. An outcry among the cows, harebells trembling, Golden hawkweed, ladies slipper and a tiny yellow four-petaled flower growing flat in xx the turf. Butterflies and ripe dry seeding grass. […]. And oh Mike! I felt I had been left broken-hearted to be going away from it all. I do so love to hear the animals all night and get up in the morning with them. Yesterday morning the sheep were all lying in one flock asleep in the dew over by the far hedge. These things are life to me, and it’s not much good saying I’m lucky to be going to Juniper. I called there and sighed as I looked down on the square of shared lawn. It would be some people’s ideal I know, but oh how different from mine!11
In fact, she did not move to Juniper Cottage, staying at Potacre until it was sold after the war. It is as if her life had been a preparation for living in Potacre so that all which followed was bound to be better. Here, she reached equilibrium with nature:
All, all in sight and hearing was Nature pouring itself from one thing into another, spending and creating, running like the wind over the body of life, and flowing like blood through its heart. All changed, and nothing changed. If I may keep this knowledge, this perpetual life in me, anybody may have my visible life; anybody may have my work, my smile, if I may go on sensing the thread that ties me to the sun, to the roots of trees and the springs of joys, the one and separate strand to each star of each great constellation.12
It was the pursuit of this revelation which was eradicated by the event that dominated the rest of her life when in May 1950 she experienced her first epileptic fit. A Ray of Darkness is centred around this moment. It describes, often in harrowing xxi detail, the agonizing realization of the implications of epilepsy for herself, her unborn child and her family. These reflections are the more poignant for us given that we now know the cause (a malignant brain tumour): a fact denied her for another six years until two years before her death.
In 1949, with her husband, she had been granted a bursary to travel and they went to Ireland, where she wrote A Journalin Ireland for the benefit of her benefactor, the writer Bryher.13 This was published for the first time in 2020, in the collection The Nightingale Silenced and other late unpublishedwritings.14 On returning from Ireland, her husband began retraining as a teacher in Cheltenham, and they moved to the Black Cottage, Elkstone, among the Cotswold hills. It was where Margiad planned to resume her writing.
It is against this background, of a life that started conventionally in suburbia but which, by force of circumstance, brought her eventually to live in isolation in one of the highest villages in England, that fate intervened on May 11th, 1950 when, after composing a sonnet and making a cup of tea, she found she had lost 1 hour 15 mins: ‘I had fallen through Time, Continuity and Being’. The perilous nature of her fit became apparent: she had collapsed, her body crowded between the fender of a blazing fire and a small table on which a paraffin lamp was burning. ‘The space in which I was lying was perhaps a yard wide. My sleeve was charred by an ember but that was all. Had some special agent of preservation laid me down between lamp and fire it could not have been more dexterously done’ (p. 81). What followed is described in her unique account of epilepsy, A Ray of Darkness.
To write and publish about one’s own epilepsy was remarkably brave, given the deep suspicion and social stigma xxii attached to the illness. Her contemporary, and later friend, the world expert on epilepsy Dr William Lennox from the USA made this plea for his patients: ‘No disease is more intriguing, more protean, more pressing for solution than epilepsy and conditions relating to it.’ Further, he emphasized that ‘epilepsy is an illness that should not call for secrecy any more than diabetes […] Yet many epileptics live in a cocoon of concealment. Breaking this skein will give them […] a new freedom. Epileptics can perform this miracle […] by identifying themselves’,15 and this Margiad had already done for epilepsy sufferers and for the general public, exposing her doubts, anxieties and fears quite openly, often at times of great pain and discomfort, in A Ray of Darkness, published in 1952. To her readership they extend glimpses into her character, her toughness and resourcefulness at a time when she was under the greatest of psychological and physical stresses. Even when epilepsy had her in its full grip, she remained capable of writing narrative and composing poetry that is harrowing and arresting to read and challenging. Indeed, she invites our participation into a state of being that few of us would ever care to experience.
While attempting to understand the origins of her epilepsy, she recalled how in the year before her first seizure she had suffered occasional headaches and dizziness, while being increasingly preoccupied by both death and poetry. Moments of acute giddiness occurred in which ‘the watch wheel went round and round at the base of my brain, and as I turned and walked quite steadily away, I had the sensation of something left behind’ (p. 43). There was also a feeling of urgency which she later associated with epilepsy in minor form. During this period, she earned nothing and become disgruntled at her own xxiii company other than ‘in the third presence of Nature or, as I began to believe, God’. What happened to her on May 11th propelled her to what she described as ‘The Other Side of the Wave’; from now on all was different: ‘That which in me came last / is now the first…’ (p. 75)
Her doctor arranged a consultation a month later with the director of the Burden Neurological Institute Bristol, Professor Frederick Golla. Until then, she could only speculate on whether her seizure indicated epilepsy per se or some other condition. But this itself led to complications of denial of her own diagnosis while raising existential issues of morbidity and mortality. A heightened sense of her vulnerability made her consider again her role in Nature: ‘That unity between what many call inanimate Nature, and the being of a human creature, was never so apparent as it was to me then.’ (p. 90)
This period of uncertainty over her diagnosis was clearly distressing: ‘Ultimately it is hope, not fear, which makes me think of death. Perhaps I am not going to have a long life; and so this feeling, which is only healthily appropriate to age, is right for me’ (p. 94). And, most profoundly, ‘Yet I began to see that I was not free, that I was indeed in chains to my brain, and even hopelessly and despairingly involved with it and I began to ask: “Is epilepsy a religious or a moral disease? Is it possible that it is my fault?”’ (p. 100) In other words, she reified her disease: ‘she is an epileptic, not a human being who sometimes had fits.’16
The meeting with Professor Golla in June was critical for two reasons: first, because he confirmed the diagnosis of epilepsy (albeit without knowing the cause) and second because it presaged a deep, almost ardent, life-long relationship between the two of them: he the consultant (aged seventy-two) xxiv and she the patient (forty-one). It is tempting, and probably not unreasonable, to equate this feeling of dependency on Professor Golla with the fictional unrequited relationship with a doctor that she described some twenty years earlier in TheWooden Doctor (1933).17 Then, it was a young woman’s fanciful passion: now it was for real, since Professor Golla and his institute seemed to offer hope for revival: he considered that her seizure may have been a once-only occurrence deriving from an accident some thirty years earlier.
During the next few months, in which she suffered no more seizures, she discovered she was pregnant with her first child. And then, in October that year, she had a second fit. She faced another awful truth: ‘I wish I hadn’t this poor mole of a child in me, whose rising presence in the cottage is less than the disease’ (p. 127). She considered abortion: ‘But no normal pregnant woman can think of the extinction of her child, her mysterious twin, without anguish. My horror of the twist in my brain, of its possible inheritance by my baby, may have made it seem that I was anxious not to bear it’ (p. 128). However, Professor Golla confirmed that her condition was not heritable. ‘Before my inward eyes, this man seemed to spread the authoritative, the peacock, wings of an archangel. The child was to live. It was to be true. It was mine and I was to keep it […] two tears rose to my eyes […] One it seemed was mine, and one the child’s’ (p. 132).
Her account of her epilepsy, A Ray of Darkness, was written after her daughter was born and it follows the attempt by a young woman writer to look after a baby and at the same time come to terms with and describe an illness that was physically and mentally debilitating and socially embarrassing. It records the progress of her disorder but xxv without explaining the cause: this would not be established until two years before her death in March 1958.
The book is dedicated to Bryher, the one person apart from Golla in whom she had complete faith, as is clear in the letters she sent to Bryher over the entire period of her illness, some of which are reproduced in the 2020 edition of The NightingaleSilenced.18A Ray of Darkness is divided into three parts, the first describing the period leading up to her first seizure, the second (titled The Other Side of the Wave) explores the tumult in her mind when faced with the certainty of being epileptic, while the third is perhaps the most challenging of the parts. In it, she offers a reason for writing the book: ‘It was the cause of the suffering, the terror before, the sorrow after, that I set myself to analyze’ (p. 174). Her own judgement of her success is not encouraging: ‘And far from arriving at anything but a question – the question of what the body is symbolizing during an epileptic fit – I am aware of not having succeeded even in describing the mental process of an attack’ (p. 181). The book is shot through with paradox, exemplified at its simplest in her quest to distinguish between her mind and her brain:
there is no part of the brain which is still working. The surprise may be registered by the mind, which my fits have made me believe, is separate from the brain. It would seem to me that the mind is a soft surface which receives the impression of thought and sensation from the brain and is therefore always slightly behind in recording what is actually being done at the moment by the brain. It travels, like sound, behind the jet aeroplane. Therein lies the danger; for the mind is still unbelieving of danger while the brain is losing, or has lost, control of the body (p. 156-7).
xxvi Her search for the truth about her illness is not dissimilar to her quest to understand her relationship with nature, so elegantly addressed in Autobiography. Indeed, she argued that A Ray of Darkness is the natural successor to Autobiography:
I wrote to this most just and fair critic and told him [the critic Derek Savage] that, as I was not dead, neither was Autobiography spiritually speaking finished, and that I hoped yet to develop. At E[lkstone] I felt that I was growing both before and after the major attacks began; and I feel now that this story of my brain is in fact the second part of Autobiography and belongs to it. (p. 65)
There is some justification for considering that TheNightingale Silenced forms the third and final part of a trilogy since it charts the last eight years of her short life:
In Autobiography there was vaguely hinted a belief in God the Creator. A Ray of Darkness was to some extent the affirmation of God the Inspirer: in this the latest and saddest appendix to the two books there is a feeling towards God the Compassionate, if only because it is so needed.19
Following the publication of A Ray of Darkness in 1952, a reviewer for the British Epilepsy Association criticized the book:
[…] for her, epilepsy becomes part of her egotism, a wholly personal experience rather than one which many others know. Epileptics may find comfort in the sharing of her experiences but not […] if they accept it as typical of epilepsy as a whole, xxvii rather than as the reaction […] of an unusual, even distorted personality.20
As an afterthought, the reviewer averred the book would have made more interesting reading if more care had been taken in putting it together.
This attack on Margiad’s attempt to share her experiences, written at such a high cost, hurt her very much. In a letter she wrote of A Ray of Darkness:
Doctors and specialists approved [of it], so did most of the reviews. But just lately it has been attacked by the British Epilepsy Association. They are a very arrogant body, who like to set before one what one should write on this almost uncharted subject: and I’m beginning to doubt their power for good. But I was hurt and offended. This was no ordinary literary review. It was written by ‘a brilliant young scientist’ whose opinions on epilepsy differ extremely from mine.
But not all specialists responded negatively to her attempt: she was able to add that
The day after I’d seen this review, Dr Lennox […] wrote to ask if he might be allowed to quote from the book in a study of the brain and particularly epilepsy he is trying to write.21 I was truly made proud […] So a specialist has understood my meaning of egotist as I tried to explain it, not as it has been as usual stupidly distorted by the second rate ‘brilliant’ mind.22
Dr Lennox had written from Boston to Margiad in April 1953 praising her for her book: xxviii
No other epileptic writer, poet, mystic or activist has shared his experiences so explicitly and so generously or has used words so deftly in tracing a way through the deep passages where brain, mind and spirit join […] The special treasure of your book for me is the descriptions of sensations; thoughts and mental experiences which the usual patients would not even attempt to reconstruct. Your gift of words weighted with imagery fills some of this goal […] I ask the privilege of reproduction of certain sentences for my own audience of doctors.23
His book, Epilepsy and Related Disorders, was published after her death, in 1960, and for many years was the world standard reference on epilepsy.
It is seven decades since A Ray of Darkness was written. In that time, the treatment of epilepsy has been transformed, at least in western societies. Diagnosis has been revolutionised by the development of brain scanners, treatments are better-targeted both with new drugs that have fewer side-affects and with advanced brain surgery. However, although seizures can be better predicted and controlled, the social stigma that attaches to the disease is not diminishing especially in developed countries. A further complication is the general ignorance of the population about this disorder, so well illustrated by Ian Bone in his recent book.24
