[We] can explain much of the passionate imagery in Davies' work as the outcome of a childhood of repression and introspection. This aspect of his art is particularly traceable in his early novels, and we know that before he left the Rhondda for his first paid job, the young dreamer wrote down innumerable tales and also vague phantasies of an imaginary race of Welsh ancestors….

Childhood impressions form much of the basic material in his novels. Their harsh features belong to the rigid Welsh Nonconformist puritanism in which he grew up, the "physical phenomena of the slagheaps and slums, over-drinking and furtive sexuality", while the lyrical element, veiling his naturalism in all his novels to a greater or less extent, is drawn from his dreamworld of childhood. In the boy-hero of To-Morrow to Fresh Woods Davies has created not only a portrait of himself as a child and adolescent, but an expression of the imaginative artistic mind in the conflict with the world of reality. (p. 49)

There is moreover much evidence in his early work of the great influence of the Authorised Version. The Welsh puritans imbibe a particular richness of phrase and imagery from their constant reading and memorising of the Bible. This fact is noticeable not only in the whole of Anglo-Welsh literature but in the everyday-speech of the ordinary Welsh people, and Davies was no exception to its powerful educating influence. The Bible, more than anything else, supplied his boyhood with reading and nourished his starved phantasy with its rich imagery. The Song of Solomon is strongly recalled by the images in several of his early stories of sexual passion, especially in Reuben, the chief character of his first novel The Withered Root. One of his last work, The Black Venus, is full of biblical allusions and richness of phrase, while we find the same formative influence of the Bible on his style also in the best of his short stories. (pp. 49-50)

[His] first novel, The Withered Root, has a theme about a passionate young man and his struggle to achieve success as a revivalist preacher in face of parental opposition, and is in its emotional force, rich glowing prose and subtle handling of an intensely dramatic conflict between mother and son, not only a remarkable first novel, but … one of Davies' best books. (p. 50)

The most decisive influence, however, in the development of his realistic prose style was exerted by the great French naturalists. About the time he left Wales he conceived, to use his own words,

a passionate love for French literature, and for Zola, Anatole France and Flaubert in particular.

It is not surprising that Madame Bovary for some months was a kind of Bible to him; and as we distinguish the influence of Maupassant in several of his short stories, so we clearly trace in some of his novels Flaubert's studies of women. Apart from that period of enthusiasm for the French, we find that D. H. Lawrence's erotic philosophy was a leading factor in his development, particularly in his themes.

This is very noticeable in his novels Count your Blessings and The Things Men Do and in the collection of short stories A Pig in a Poke. Count your Blessings is a book whose heroine is a prostitute, and deals realistically with life in a Welsh city brothel, while A Bed of Feathers is another rather cruel story of this period. From one of his early short stories, Mrs. Evans Nr. Six, one obtains a good impression of Davies' bitter and cynical tone of accusation and social rebellion against environment. (p. 51)

In Davies' fiction these "grim lower hill slopes," and the sullen world of the collieries are often brought into a higher relief by the beautiful or at least clean mountains surrounding the industrial valley. They provide the lyrical element even in his most realistic novels; the free and airy summits are set in romantic contrast to the "tangled dramas of human beings fallen from their high estate." It is the contrast of nature and industrial civilisation. In the Red Hills it has been elaborated into the leitmotiv of the whole novel.

This lyrical element, however, so strong at first, becomes gradually more subdued. The dilemma in the young writer between the sordid outer world and his essentially lyric inner life provides him with the stimulus and direction to his future work and leads to a tempered realism. Davies undergoes a process of hardening and a transformation, influenced as much by environment as by literature. But in all his writing we detect a depth of warm feeling, an undercurrent of sincere lyrical emotion, which is the real core of his nature. (pp. 51-2)

But particularly striking seems the influence of D. H. Lawrence on his early work. Davies shows very similar conceptions about the importance of the erotic problems. This general theme, so important in the framework of society after the first world war, the notions of sexual freedom brought about by the emancipation of women is treated by him from the Welsh regional point of view. It is one that makes his first novels especially powerful and already broadens their scope beyond a local significance. The generally human problem of the relations between the sexes is, as it were, superimposed on the particular milieu of the South Wales coalfield, and Davies is particularly preoccupied with the intense emotions aroused by it. The surging desires, conflicting and hampered passions, and all the other dramatic situations arising from the eternal war of the sexes, form the majority of his early themes within an intensely realistic framework. Like Lawrence he betrays an intuitive conviction that human vitality finds its most significant expression in sex. But this concept has not acquired the same philosophical expressiveness nor is it cast into such a consistent artistic scheme. Though sex is not as dominant as with Lawrence, the fact remains that his leading characters are often "caught in the maelstrom of sexual passion" and the outcome is … a very emotional and biased picture of Wales. But this personal element does in no way detract from its artistic value.

Davies never had Lawrence's propagandistic background and as he moves away from the immediate influence of the postwar era, he gradually becomes less passionate, more humorous and takes a wider and more humane view of society; he gains distance and perspective and finds his own mode of expression. The turning-point between the period dominated by erotic and sociological aspects and his period of sober, detached realism of the mature phase would seem to be the novel Jubilee Blues…. But his short stories, even the latest of them, return again and again to his first and favourite subjects: the betrayal of man by woman; the triumph of sensual woman over man; the mockery that marriage can be; man's fight to free himself from a sense of guilt towards woman and to stand alone; and the power of greed and habit over the soul. Investigation of the themes of his novels and stories shows that the great majority is definitely of a realistic and cynical character…. Most of Davies' heroes are matter-of-fact materialists. There is, of course, the type of the young dreamer in his early novels, but he usually fights a losing battle against the grim and sordid world of industrial civilisation. In the end there is always disillusionment, even if it is tempered by sober confidence in the future as in A Time to Laugh. The plots themselves are based on unemployment, strikes and riots, the fight for an existence, the diverging interests of the social classes, the economic factors in the mining community as well as among the small farmers.

A survey of his characters also shows that his preoccupation with the primitive in man takes a peculiar turn towards what might be called a matriarchal view of society. He has an abundant collection of strong women. Nearly always the woman occupies the dominating position in the conflict of the sexes, and more often than not it is she who is the calculating realist, while her partner is merely a tool in her hands, even if she is not the central figure of the plot. How far this weighting of the scales is based on observation among the mining community and how far it is an expression of preconceived ideas and of the influence of Lawrence, the French, and the trends of the psychological novel, is hard to determine. It can only be partly due to observed background and the author's imagination must be the determining factor here. (pp. 52-3)

When he does show a male triumph, like that of the horrible old miner-deacon in A Bed of Feathers, the victory is, to be sure, complete, yet the woman has satisfied her natural desires in the surreptitious manner which we come to expect of all the wrongly-mated women of his first period. Davies is as cynical as Maupassant in his treatment of marriage as a conflict of the sexes. Simple sex-hunger surrounded by all kinds of strange inhibitions, some of them fine ideals, some the most petty and mean motives, are the situations that fascinate him. It is on their moral complexity that he builds his plots. Apart from an extreme case like that in A Bed of Feathers, or the heroines swayed by primitive sexuality in A Time to Laugh, there is another example of the power of repressed passion in one of his short stories, The Song of Songs: Jane is a young woman who lives with her invalid father, attending to him with a wrathful and impatient devotion. When a powerfully built miner makes love to her she gives herself to him—passionately as his male conceit believes. He is amazed, therefore, at her absolute refusal to marry him. After a time long enough to know that she is pregnant, she goes to a little baldheaded man who owns a prosperous grocery-shop and makes him blissfully happy by agreeing to marry him. She wanted a child from the strong man but was afraid of male domination. With the little grocer she could have her own way and compensate herself for the years of subjection to her father.—Though such plots may seem crude and oversimplified when thus summarized and lifted from their context, we must refrain from judging the living structure of Davies' stories by the dead skeleton of their subject-matter.

Even in his later novels this inverted Lawrentian philosophy plays a considerable part. A typical case is Cassie, the heroine of Jubilee Blues, one of Davies' best works. Cassie, a country girl married to a weak husband, is the hostess of the Jubilee public-house in the midst of the ugly, ruined mining valley. She is "healthy, shrewd, immensely vital, with something primitive in her and a shining integrity of soul also, not always lovable but equipped for life with the sharp edge of character." Her husband on the other hand is rotten in the core. At the climax of the novel she leaves him and returns with her two children to the country to work on a farm. (pp. 54-5)

While all the early novels have the industrial background, Davies published in 1940 a book with an entirely rural setting, Under the Rose, which … marks the real turning point. From now on his subjects take on a larger significance, the whole field of character widens, and the sociological aspect loses its importance. The preoccupation with Lawrence's sex-philosophy also disappears, though passionate and dramatic elements remain as one of the characteristics of his style, even when they are tempered and mellowed by his mature objectiveness and his sense of humour. He returned to his native Rhondda once more in his next autobiographical novel To-Morrow to Fresh Woods (1941), but published in 1944 another full-length novel with a completely rural background, The Black Venus, which he calls his most popular book, "a romance written around the ancient pastoral custom of courting in bed."

Though his most enduring works will be found among those which are closely related to the Welsh scene, Davies is by no means regional in the narrow sense of the term; lately he has turned more to England for his material, especially in his short stories. In The Boy with a Trumpet, for instance, a story concerning a neurotic youth in conflict with modern life, in Orestes, a modern adaptation of the ancient theme, and in many others he has shown that his art, even in subject-matter, knows no restrictions of environment. (p. 55)