The 2025 Edward Lhuyd Annual Lecture of the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol and the Learned Society of Wales was delivered by Professor Jane Aaron at Pontio, Bangor, on 18 November 2025.
As well as analysing literature concerned with the relationship between people and the environment, ecocriticism has a political aim: to deepen our historical understanding of the causes of the current environmental crisis and to strengthen our resolve to resist those who seek to dismiss it. This lecture considers the poetic work of some nineteenth-century Welsh writers whose lives were transformed by the industrial revolution, and ask whether their response to the loss of greenery carries a message for us today.
Jane Aaron is Emerita Professor in the School of Humanities at the University of South Wales and author of Pur fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg, which won the Ellis Griffith Memorial Prize in 1999; Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing in Wales, which won the Roland Mathias Prize in 2009; the volume Welsh Gothic (2013); and her biography Cranogwen, which won the Wales Book of the Year Award in the Creative Non-Fiction category in 2024.
