Allen Raine

Biography

Before the world knew her as Allen Raine, she was born Anne Adalisa Evans in the coastal town of Newcastle Emlyn, Carmarthenshire, on 6 October 1836. While her novels—sparkling with Welsh hills, chapel gossip, and forbidden kisses—would one day sell in the hundreds of thousands, she first cracked the literary market at fifty-five with the 1891 serial *Torn Sails*, a tale later bound in cloth and devoured on both sides of the Atlantic. Cinema came knocking only after her death in 1908. The flickering ghosts of her characters stepped into the limelight twice: in 1915, when *A Welsh Singer* leapt from page to silver sheet, and again in 1920, when *By Berwin Banks* followed suit. Though the reels are now lost, the titles remain milestones of early British film, proof that Raine’s stories could travel from chapel-veiled villages to the electric darkness of a picture palace without losing a heartbeat of their Welsh soul.