Works by
Stevie Davies
(Writer)

Fiction

• The Eyrie (2007, UK,  US)
  Nobody at The Eyrie is quite like Red Dora - in her eighties, she's a Scots ex-Communist, ex-Trotskyite who fought in the Spanish Civil War. With her fiery brand of radical anticapitalism, she conjures plans of political sabotage and computer hacking. She rails at a society that seems to have forgotten its political roots and a government that doesn't care. But beneath her rage lies a more intimate disappointment, a tragic death she has yet to come to terms with. Eirlys is a madly patriotic Welsh woman with a brass dragon on her door. She is the 'mother' of the The Eyrie's little clan - always providing tea and sympathy. Little do the other residents suspect that Eirlys was once in prison...Hannah comes to The Eyrie to escape years of boredom in a dreary middle-class marriage to a man she never loved. Reveling in her new found freedom, she finds that life at The Eyrie offers surprising new opportunities and an unlikely co-conspirator in Red Dora.

• Kith & Kin (2004, UK, US)
  Stevie Davies's KITH & KIN is a moving, scalpel-sharp story of close family relationships...The writing is urgent and surprising, the tale at its most hilarious when it is bitter and bizarre...I couldn't put this book down until I had finished it' Patricia Duncker Mara and Frankie are cousins and best friends, growing up in the stifling atmosphere of Swansea in the 1950s, amid a bickering yet close-knit extended family. But their passionate friendship comes under threat as they reach adolescence in the heady atmosphere of the Sixties - a decade in which the conventions of family and kinship are overturned. Years later, as Mara begins to confront the questions surrounding Frankie's death, she is drawn back into their secret past and the struggles of a generation betrayed by its own values.

• The Element of Water (2001, UK, US) -- Winner 2002 Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year award
  In pre-war Germany, two boys grow up together inseparable. However, as adulthood approaches and Nazism continues its inexorable march, Dahl and Quantz can no longer reconcile their childhood friendship as one becomes an SS officer and the other a pawn in the intelligence unit. Thirteen years later, their children meet: a woman and a man exposed to the sins of their fathers.

• Impassioned Clay (1999, UK, US)
  When Olivia's mother dies and her grave is dug in the garden of the family home, a skeleton of a 17th-century woman is uncovered. The remains are crushed, but one thing remains intact - a scold's bridle. Only when Olivia unearths the story of the woman does she begin to understand her own passions.

• The Web of Belonging (1997, UK, US)
  Jess has lived peacefully in Shrewsbury with her husband Jacob for many years. He is solid, dependable and treats her well. She is content just to be his wife and to look after 'The Oldies', the relatives they took in one by one as they became helpless and dependent. Little did they expect the amount of trouble three elderly people could bring. First there is Brenda, the most self-sufficient of the lot and a supporter of worthy causes. Then there is May, a turbulent woman who needs constant watching after punching the health visitor. She rails about a woman who looked after six priests for 45 years and won a medal from the Pope. Finally there is Cousin Nathan, who is of a holy disposition and insists on quoting Scripture at every opportunity. They live in contented discord until one evening Jacob simply disappears. 'Arrange the funeral,' cries May. Then Jacob is spotted in Ludlow on the arm of a blonde...

• Four Dreamers and Emily (1996, UK, US)
  Meet Eileen Nussey James, a self-professed expert on Emily Bronte and her passion; Marianne Pendleton, an overworked lecturer and slave to domesticity; Timothy Whitty, the widower who receives nocturnal visits from Emily's ghost; and Sharon Mitchell, a waitress drawn into the world of academia.

• Closing the Book (1994, UK, US)
  A novel from the award-winning author of Arms and the Girl, concerning two female companions who face sudden change and both the future and history of their lives and love together are called into question.

• Arms and the Girl (1992, UK, US)

• Primavera (1990, UK, US)

• Boy Blue (1987, US)

• Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1996, US), Stevie Davies, ed.

Non-fiction

• Century of Troubles (2001, UK, US)
  To accompany a season of drama documentaries on Channel 4, Stevie Davies tells the political and social history of England in the 17th century.

• Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution 1640- 1660 (1998, UK, US)
  In the tradition of many books reclaiming women's writing, the author turns her attention to the seldom-covered period of the seventeenth century and uncovers a magnificent and vibrant array of women insisting on their right to the written word.

• Emily Brontë (1998, UK, )

• Emily Brontë: Heretic (1999, UK, US)

• Emily Brontë (1988, UK, US)

• Emily Brontë: The Artist as a Free Woman  (1983, UK, US) 
  Offers a brief profile of Bronte, examines the themes and style of her poetry, and provides a new interpretation of Wuthering Heights.

• The Brontë Sisters: Selected Poems (1976, UK, US), Stevie Davies, ed.

• John Donne (1994, UK, US)

• John Milton (1991, UK, US)
  This work is based on an extra-mural class on Milton taken by the author at Manchester University in 1988/89. It deals with his work before the Civil War in 1642, various aspects of "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise Regained" and "Samson Agonistes".

• Images of Kingship in Paradise Lost: Milton's Politics and Christian Liberty (1983, UK, US) 

• The Idea of Woman in Renaissance Literature: Feminine Reclaimed (1986), UK)
  Also published as: The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton  (1986, US)

• Shakespeare's"Taming of the Shrew" (1995, UK, US)
  This is an analysis of William Shakespeare's play, "The Taming of the Shrew". It assesses the text of the folio in the light of recent theories, reassessing the play as problematic in terms of the dramatic interpretation of the language. The study includes an account of the play as a stage event and it characterizes the play as humorous, conflict-filled, full of sexual tension and dramatically brilliant. In addition, the book argues the issues of the play which relate to radical feminism, in the context of the 16th-century sex-war which reached its height in the 1590's when not only literature but also a full scale pamphlet war raged between feminists and anti-feminists.

• Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" (1993, UK, US)
  This is a reader and companion to Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night". An introduction to the dramatic action of the play's meaning is followed by chapters exploring the folly tradition, language and the liberating comedy of sexual ambiguity.

• Henry Vaughan (1995, UK, US)

• Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" (1989, UK, US)
  A critical reading of Virginia Woolf's novel "To the Lighthouse" for A level candidates and undergraduates.

• Shakespeare: Twelfth Night (1993, US), Brian Loughrey and Stevie Davies, eds.

• Renaissance Views of Man (1978, UK, US)

See also:

• Dreams and Other Aggravations: Selected Poems (1995, 2003 UK) by Carla Lane, Stevie Davies, ed.