Brushstrokes of a Story: the art behind Should Have Told You Sooner
The idea for my forthcoming novel–Should Have Told You Sooner (She Writes Press, releasing February 10, 2026)–came to me while I was immersed in a book of Welsh folk tales. One Moonlit Night, written by T. Llew Jones and translated into English by Gillian Clarke, is a child’s book, full of lovely illustrations among the simplified stories, perfectly written for either the young or the newbie to Welsh mythology—for anyone really who loves cultural lore.
I found the Welsh lore transportive. One story from this collection in particular, “The Lady of Llyn Y Fan Fach,” captivated me and set my imagination racing. In it, a young farmer named Gwyn visits the lake named in the title, and while he is there, a most beautiful fairy rises from the water and speaks to him. She is Nelferch, and in an instant, Gwyn is in love.
After a courtship that is more a test of Gwyn’s devotion, Nelferch agrees to marry him, sacrificing the watery world she knows for a life with him on dry land. But before they marry, she serves him with a warning. “If you strike me three times, I will return to my home in Llyn Y Fan Fach.”
Gwyn is horrified by the suggestion that he might harm his new wife, and he vows he would never. But then he does, over the course of several years after having three children together. All three “strikes” are completely without malice and range from careless to accidental, but that doesn’t matter to Nelferch. All she knows is Gwyn failed to love her the way he promised. She dives back into Llyn Y Fan Fach, leaving Gwyn on the shore, bereft and with three young boys to raise on his own.
Long after finishing the entire collection, this one story occupied my mind. I kept thinking about Nelferch and Gwyn and all the ways we might harm those we profess to love.
With that big idea on my mind, it wasn’t long before I stopped thinking about the folk tale characters and began imagining a more contemporary pair. A young woman off to college in a country she doesn’t know well, studying art history and falling in love for the first time. A young man on the cusp of fame as a painter, falling in love with her right back. And finally, the two people they become after thirty years of living without each other: a recently separated art historian living and working outside Boston, and a renowned artist living like a hermit in his grandfather’s cottage along the southwest coast of Wales. Noel Enfield and Bryn Jones.
While “The Lady of Llyn Y Fan Fach” contributed to the plot, Noel’s and Bryn’s art-related occupations put the meat on the plot’s bones. I stared at art images in between writing sessions, wandered in and out of art museums in London, bent the ears of two very lovely women artists who were (and are) so generous with their time and thoughts. Every piece and place I explored got poured into Noel’s chosen vocation; into Bryn’s art; and into the art of Henry Bell, an up-and-coming young painter who touches their lives in a very profound way.
In the video above, I pulled together for you a handful of paintings that became important to the telling of this story, along with some notes about each one. I hope you‘ll give it a look as you get ready to meet Noel, Bryn, and Henry.
Links for further reading:
About The Lady of Llyn Y Fan Fach
JMW Turner’s Slave Ships
About Kyffin Williams and the Welsh Landscape
About Kyffin Williams and his paintings of melancholy mountains
About William Blake