(Lynette writing about) Nesta Recollection, Reconstruction and Reclamation in Lynette Roberts's 'Lost' Novel

Abstract

Intended as the first ever scholarly publication on 'Nesta', an unpublished 1940s novel, this article furthers the nascent re-discovery of the Argentine-Welsh writer Lynette Roberts, whose poems returned to print in 2005. Written by Roberts in Llanybri, Carmarthenshire, during the 1940s, and potentially revised in the mid-1950s, 'Nesta' is an unevenly experimental re-construction of the life of the Welsh medieval princess Nest ferch Rhys, and was read by figures such as Robert Graves, and T.S. Eliot, who considered the novel for publication at Faber. This essay argues that central to an understanding of 'Nesta' is that the text is very consciously