“Some people are remembered with statues and fanfare. Others leave their mark in quieter ways – through words that outlive them. Ann Julia Kemble, better known as Ann of Swansea, was one of those people.”

Ann was born in 1764 into the famous Kemble family, a family of theatre legends. Her sister, Sarah Siddons, became one of Britain’s most celebrated actresses. Her brother, John Philip Kemble, was a famous tragedian on the London stage. But Ann’s life was nothing like theirs. Hers was a story of resilience, reinvention, and survival.

Her early years were tough. She married a man who turned out already to have a wife, leaving her abandoned, penniless, and disgraced. At one point, she was so desperate that she attempted suicide inside Westminster Abbey, an act that caused a scandal in its day. To survive, she is believed to have worked for a time in a London bagnio, essentially a brothel, where she suffered a gunshot wound to the face. These early traumas would later shape the dark, gothic themes of her writing.

In 1792, Ann married again, this time to William Hatton, and moved to America. There, she achieved a small but remarkable piece of literary history: she became the first woman known to write an opera libretto in America, for a work called Tammany: The Indian Chief.

But life was never easy. By 1799, Ann and her husband had returned to Swansea, where they ran a bathing house on the coast. When William died in 1806, Ann was left widowed and struggling once again. She moved briefly to Kidwelly to run a dancing school, before finally returning to Swansea for good.

It was here, in this very community, that Ann became known as Ann of Swansea.

Between 1809 and 1838, she wrote 14 novels, as well as poems and essays, many of them published through the Minerva Press, a publisher famous for gothic fiction and popular women’s literature. Her novels, with titles like Cambrian Pictures, Chronicles of an Illustrious House, and Guilty or Not Guilty, often explored themes of injustice, class divides, and redemption.

Ann was not wealthy or celebrated like her siblings, but she had a voice, and she used it to speak for those on the margins. Her own life of rejection and survival gave her a sharp eye for hypocrisy, and she often wrote about the resilience of women in a world that tried to silence them.

Ann died in Swansea in 1838, at the age of 74. She was buried here, in the churchyard of St John-juxta-Swansea, the same ground you are walking now. Her headstone has not survived, but the records confirm her presence here, a quiet marker of a remarkable life lived against the odds.

Today, Ann is remembered as a pioneering woman writer of Wales, though for many years her story was almost forgotten. A blue plaque in Swansea Civic Centre now honours her contributions. Her portrait is displayed in Swansea Museum and the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, while her works are studied by scholars exploring the voices of women in Romantic and Gothic literature.

Ann’s life reminds us of something important: that history is not just about kings and battles. It’s also about women who wrote by candlelight. It’s about people who fell, got back up, and kept going.

As you stand in this garden, take a moment to picture her, a woman with ink-stained hands, a fierce mind, and a story that could not be silenced.