Amy Dillwyn

The idea behind this series is to celebrate remarkable people who have challenged gender stereotyping in order to live lives of adventure and professional discovery. The series features many women who have dressed as men to be able to pursue education or careers and also literary women, such as Amy Dillwyn and Florence Dixie, who have used their own experiences to champion women’s rights.                            Kate Milsom 2018

Milsom's portrait of Amy Dillwyn was informed by research, undertaken by Kirsti Bohata, Professor in English Literature at Swansea University, which has unearthed Dillwyn’s queer life and writing. 

 "Amy Dillwyn (1845-1935) was a writer, campaigner and industrialist from Swansea.  She fell in love with Olive Talbot (1843-1894), daughter of the wealthy C R M Talbot of Margam and Penrice, when she was fifteen years old.  The two women were close friends for decades.  They shared a love of music (Dillwyn had a fine contralto voice and was an amateur composer) and both were devoted churchwomen, members of the high-Anglican All Saints in Margaret Street, London.  They were frequent visitors to each other’s homes in Hendrefoilan, Margam and London, aided by the close relationship between the Dillwyns and Talbots (Olive’s aunt married Amy’s uncle, and their fathers shared business and political interests), and during the 1870s they took extended trips to spa towns for Olive’s health.  Amy Dillwyn’s diaries document her growing passion for Olive whom she came to call her ‘wife’, though she also lamented that Olive’s feelings for her were ‘but an ordinary affair’.

Though the pair stand apart in the painting, they are joined by the olive leaves which span the picture, and by books and letters.  Love between women, and devotion to an unobtainable woman, was the subject of several of Amy Dillwyn’s novels, particularly Jill (1884) and A Burglary (1883), but also – in a more coded way – The Rebecca Rioter (1880) which transposes many details of Dillwyn’s feelings for Olive onto the love of a Welsh-speaking male labourer for the upper-class daughter of the local magistrate.  The books in the left-hand corner recall Dillwyn’s literary career and are piled on a copy of The Spectator, to which Dillwyn contributed regular reviews and occasional articles over a sixteen year period. 

In her fifties, Dillwyn inherited her father’s spelter works which was at risk of bankruptcy.  She became, in her words, ‘a man of business’ and led the company out of debt. Her daily activities made use of her fluency in several languages. The donkey is a reference to her trip into the Atlas Mountains in Algeria in 1905 in search of calamine for her spelter (zinc) works. The map recalls the Dillwyn family’s investments in slum housing in Swansea. Amy Dillwyn is pictured in an outfit she wore to her father’s funeral in 1892, in defiance of Victorian funeral conventions which she said led to poor families getting into debt to buy black mourning outfits and exploitation of workers who had to produce the clothes at a moment’s notice.  The trilby hat, cigar and sturdy boots became celebrated markers of the unconventional ‘Miss Dillwyn’, the self-described ‘man of business’, from the late 1890s.

Though Dillwyn is frank about her feelings for Olive in her diaries, this relationship was omitted from earlier accounts of her life.  Encouraged by new research into Dillwyn’s queer writing, her biographer, David Painting, deposited Dillwyn’s diaries in Swansea University archives.  Kate Milsom’s painting celebrates Dillwyn’s masculinity and acknowledges the centrality of Olive Talbot to the creative and erotic life of Amy Dillwyn."