Irish Anglican Literature and Drama: Hybridity and Discord 3030683524, 9783030683528

Citation preview

Irish Anglican Literature and Drama Hybridity and Discord

David Clare

Irish Anglican Literature and Drama “For Irish Protestants of a previous generation, critical investigation of Irish society was hushed and usually led to the shuddering injunction ‘Don’t rock the boat’. Through its skillful analysis of fiction, playscripts, poems, memoirs, essays, and journalism, David Clare’s work excavates the Irish Anglican vein in literature and society, gradually surmounting the much (ab)used ‘Anglo-Irish’ designation as part of its subtle project. At the same time as capturing the cultural lineage and historical potency of this distinct social group, here is a book that quietly rocks the boat.” —Connal Parr, Northumbria University “This book’s careful discussion of the various economic and social classes that are at play in Irish Anglican literature and drama is possibly the most comprehensive ever presented. Another extremely valuable aspect of the study is that it resurrects influential authors from the past (including several women writers) who have been largely overlooked or misunderstood.” —Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Massachusetts Maritime Academy

David Clare

Irish Anglican Literature and Drama Hybridity and Discord

David Clare Fanore, Co. Clare, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-030-68352-8    ISBN 978-3-030-68353-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68353-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Harvey Loake This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Deirdre

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to: My colleagues in the Department of Drama and Theatre Studies at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, for their invaluable support and encouragement: Michael Finneran, Fiona McDonagh, and Carole Quigley. The editors at Palgrave Macmillan—Eileen Srebernik and Jack Heeney— for supporting this project and seeing this book into print. Emilie Pine, for providing invaluable advice, input, and inspiration ever since her time as my PhD supervisor. Feargal Whelan, for the always fascinating chats about Irish culture and the enriching conference and research collaborations. Colleagues and friends whose support, suggestions, and words of wisdom during the preparation of this book have been greatly appreciated: Matthew Bothner, Michael Brown, Barry Casey, Margéurite Corporaal, Daithí de Bláca, Clare Delargy, Deirdre Flynn, Peter Gahan, Michael Griffin, Gabi Hartvig, Éanna Hickey, Barry Houlihan, Rónán Johnston, Kenneth Keating, Derek Kelly, Seán Kennedy, Declan Kiberd, Mária Kurdi, Kathryn Laing, Des Lally, Cathy Leeney, Patrick Lonergan, Deirdre McFeely, Audrey McNamara, Trish McTighe, Nicola Morris, Dorothy Morrissey, Ciara L. Murphy, Justine Nakase, Caoilfhionn Ní Bheacháin, Eugene O’Brien, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Connal Parr, Alex Pettit, Brian Reidy, Anthony Roche, Andy Rouse, Aileen Ruane, Melissa Sihra, Elaine Sisson, Brian Tavey, Melania vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Terrazas Gallego, Eric Tiénou, Tim Ural, Ruud van den Beuken, James Ward, Clare Wallace, and all the members of the Gate Theatre Research Network (https://www.ru.nl/gatetheatre/). The Arts Faculty, Research and Graduate School Office (RGSO), and International Office at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick—for supporting my research and my professional development in myriad ways. Finally, my family, for their fantastic love and support: my brilliant and gorgeous wife, Deirdre; my late, much-missed mother (like me, someone raised Catholic but fascinated by Protestants!), and my father (always very engaged by issues related to national and ethnic identity); my sister, Nadia, her husband, Dan, my nephew, Holden, and my niece, Emily; my foster brothers, Nhi and Phong Tran, and their families; and my extended family in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.

Contents

1 Introduction: “Middle Nation”?  1 References  19 2 Elizabeth Griffith: Celebrating and Extending the Irish Anglican Dramatic Tradition 25 Griffith’s Background and Early Career  26 The Platonic Wife   27 The Double Mistake   29 The School for Rakes   32 A Wife in the Right   36 The Times  39 Conclusion  41 References  45 3 The Portraits of the English in the Work of Dion Boucicault, Bram Stoker, and Erskine Childers 49 Dion Boucicault  51 Bram Stoker  54 Erskine Childers  56 Conclusion  58 References  61

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Contents

4 Charlotte Brooke’s Impact on Ascendancy Women Writers from Maria Edgeworth to Lady Gregory 65 Charlotte Brooke  67 Maria Edgeworth  68 Sydney Owenson (a.k.a. Lady Morgan)  71 Mary Balfour  73 Lady Gregory  75 Conclusion  78 References  82 5 C.S. Lewis and the Irish Literary Canon 87 W.B. Yeats and Irish Modernists  89 Bernard Shaw  97 James Stephens 103 Jonathan Swift 104 Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke 107 Oscar Wilde 109 Laurence Sterne and George Berkeley 109 Conclusion 110 References 118 6 Gradations of Class Among Irish Anglicans in Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle123 References 138 Index141

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: “Middle Nation”?

Abstract  There has recently been a revival of interest in Irish Protestant culture among historians and literary critics. However, when drawing conclusions about “Protestants,” these scholars have frequently elided the very real differences between Irish Anglicans and (for example) Ulster Scots Presbyterians, Irish Quakers, and “New Irish” Evangelicals. When commentators specifically focus on Irish Anglicans, they often refer to them as “Anglo-Irish” and associate them exclusively with the Big House; however, Irish Anglicans have always been found among all social classes in Ireland. Also, while many from this background have self-identified as (at least on some level) “British,” they have often been very proud to be Irish and have been very critical of England. Ultimately, understanding the Irishness of culturally hybrid (i.e. Irish and British) writers from Church of Ireland backgrounds will shed light on the hybrid Irishness of the “New Irish” and members of the Irish Diaspora. Keywords  Hybridity • Irish Identities • Irish Protestants • “New Irish” • Irish Diaspora • Church of Ireland

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Clare, Irish Anglican Literature and Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68353-5_1

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Given that writer Brendan Behan was raised in a working-class, Catholic, Republican household in Dublin, it is unsurprising that he felt no sadness over the passing of the Irish Big House and no sense of romance regarding the life once lived in such houses. As far as the Socialist Behan was concerned, the residents of Irish Big Houses were a useless, idle, privileged group whose sole occupations were (in the words of one of his characters) “riding horses, drinking whiskey and reading double-meaning books in Irish at Trinity College.”1 What’s more, he strongly resented the tendency among critics and historians to regard Irish Protestants of English, Welsh, or lowland Scottish descent as “Anglo-Irish.” To his mind, “there was no such thing as an Anglo-Irishman … except as a class distinction,” and therefore, he regarded middle-class or working-class Protestants as simply Irish, not Anglo-Irish.2 That term he reserved for what he called “the Horse Protestants,” those who owned a Big House and were unerringly loyal to Britain.3 He argued that: [R.B.] Sheridan was a peasant’s grandson, Yeats an artist’s son, Wilde a doctor’s son, Parnell the grandson of an American sea-captain, Robert Emmet a doctor’s son, Bernard Shaw a clerk. The myth of the Anglo-Irish, and the attempt to drag writers (particularly those who happened to be Protestants) after the fox-hunt and the royalist inanity, would have us believe that the most rapacious rack-renting landlord-class in Europe were really lamps of culture in a bog of darkness, doing good by stealth and shoving copies of Horizon under the half-doors of the peasantry after dark and making wedding presents to the cottagers of Ganymede Press reproductions of Gauguin.4

Behan believed that calling Irish Protestant writers “Anglo-Irish” was a way for the English to tacitly claim them, by regarding them as essentially English. And he disliked the way “the myth of the Anglo-Irish” seemed to console people who had an anti-Irish and/or a pro-middle-class and upper-class bias, by allowing them to regard these writers as somehow less Irish than a working-class “Paddy.”5 As he once ruefully and accurately noted, “the Belfast industrial workers who are the thickest concentration of royalism and pro-Britishism in Ireland are never claimed as Anglo-­ Irish,” and “Sean O’Casey [raised Protestant] is not claimed as an Anglo-­ Irish writer, because he had no land, except what a window-box would hold on the sill of a Northside tenement.”6 Behan makes some excellent points in these diatribes, even if some require additional nuance or qualification. First, it should be stressed that,

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contrary to what Behan’s invective implies, important writers did actually emerge from the Irish Big House. Obvious examples include some of the women writers discussed later in this book: Charlotte Brooke, Maria Edgeworth, and Lady Gregory (all covered in Chap. 4) plus Somerville & Ross and Elizabeth Bowen (touched upon in multiple chapters). As the discussions of their lives and work in this book and in numerous other critical studies make clear, the commitment of these women to Ireland was undeniable. As such, a distinction must be made between these Big House writers and the heartless absentee landlords who lived in London off of the rents from their Irish estates and who rarely if ever visited their Irish Big Houses. All of these women, with the exception of Bowen, lived in Ireland full-time during their writing careers. As for Bowen, she split her time between England and her ancestral seat, Bowen’s Court in north Co. Cork. Upon her husband’s retirement in 1952, the couple moved back to Bowen’s Court with the intention of living there full-time. Unfortunately, his untimely death a few months later and a limited income eventually forced Bowen back to a life split between England and her Irish Big House. Further financial difficulties forced her to sell off Bowen’s Court in 1959, which left her solely resident in England. However, she held on to her dream of moving back to Ireland permanently: right up to the end of her life, she hoped to purchase a home in the Dublin suburb of Clontarf (her mother’s home place) and to live there full-time, but it was never to be. These Big House women writers should also not be confused with Irish-resident landlords who habitually treated their tenants cruelly during famines and other times of hardship. (Indeed, Maria Edgeworth worked tirelessly for the poor on her estate during the Great Hunger, even though she was 77 when famine struck in 1845.) Obviously, these writers were tied by blood or—in the case of Lady Gregory—marriage to cruel landlords (and the heartlessness of Lady Gregory’s husband during the Famine will be discussed in more detail in Chap. 4), but these women—who had a significant amount of agency in the running of their Big Houses—were certainly more compassionate than the stereotype often purveyed of harsh “Anglo-Irish” landlords. Readers might justly point out that these women still benefitted from a very unjust economic system. However, it must be asked: were the advantages enjoyed by these women that much different to the advantages enjoyed by most people in the “developed,” Western world today? After all, the greater access that most contemporary Westerners have to goods, services, and comforts is made possible by the exploitation of resources and workers in “developing” countries and by

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the exploitative, “invisible” labour engaged in by migrants, prisoners, and even modern slaves in the West itself. In other words, the cabins of the contemporary Westerner’s “tenants” have simply been exported across the seas or hidden in prisons and illicit business premises. Just because they are not visible does not mean they do not exist. Indeed, since most Westerners do not witness the suffering from which they benefit, they can be more easily compared to London-based absentee landlords from the Irish colonial era than to these Big House women writers. While Behan may have been wrong to imply that Big House residents had little or nothing to do with Irish literary culture, he was correct regarding two other matters: first, that most of the great writers usually described as “Anglo-Irish” were in fact from middle-class backgrounds, and second, that there were important Protestant writers who were raised in working-class households. Examples of the latter include Seán O’Casey, James Stephens, and excellent (if relatively unsung) writers brought up in Ulster Unionist families such as—among others—Sam Thompson and Stewart Parker.7 Of course, one could name other celebrated Protestant writers who were raised in working-class, Ulster Unionist households, such as Christina Reid, Marie Jones, Graham Reid, and Sam Hanna Bell, but they were from Ulster Scots Presbyterian backgrounds—a demographic comprised mainly of middle-class and working-class people and (as Behan notes) never described by commentators as “Anglo-Irish.” As the title of this study suggests, this book is not concerned with Irish Protestants generally. It is specifically concerned with Irish people of at least partial British descent raised in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. An overarching study on Irish Protestant writing would have to cover numerous groups, including the aforementioned Ulster Scots Presbyterians but also (among various others) Irish Quakers and “New Irish” Evangelicals— groups who differ in very significant ways from Irish Anglicans, as various commentators have noted.8 Behan is not the only writer to suggest that the term “Anglo-Irish” should be used exclusively for Big House residents, and that Irish people of British descent from middle-class and working-class Church of Ireland households should be regarded simply as Irish or perhaps “Irish Protestants”; another person who subscribed to this view is the writer examined in Chap. 6 of this study: Leland Bardwell.9 However, I believe that making a distinction of this kind is a mistake, since it elides all that Irish Anglicans from every social class have in common with each other. There has recently been an explosion of scholarly interest in Irish

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Protestants, and, as these recent interventions plus seminal studies by J.C.  Beckett, Terence Brown, W.J.  McCormack, Gerald Dawe, Edna Longley, R.F. “Roy” Foster, Robert Tracy, Vivien Mercier, and John Wilson Foster have demonstrated, there are many experiences, as well as socio-political, religious, artistic, and psychological preoccupations shared in common by Irish Anglicans across class lines.10 And, as emphasised above, these experiences and preoccupations are not necessarily shared by people from Ireland’s other Protestant communities. (That said, in this study, I will occasionally use the term “Protestant” when making observations that apply to people from all of the reformed denominations.)11 The unique mindset of Irish Anglicans clearly derives from the fact that for centuries they were “the Ascendancy”: that is, they were the Irish people who, thanks to their British ancestry and membership in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, were entrusted by English—later British—governments with political power over the Catholic, Dissenter, and Jewish residents of Ireland.12 Thanks to the Penal Laws (which began to be enforced in fits and starts in the early seventeenth century and which were repealed between 1778 and 1829), they also enjoyed more rights than their non-­ Anglican neighbours, including access to more occupations and educational opportunities. Their church was also the “established church,” and, until disestablishment in 1871,13 it received much of its financial support from tithes extracted from non-Anglican Irish people. The ties that the Ascendancy had to both England and Ireland led to them being regarded as a “middle nation.”14 This appellation was first applied to the “Old English”—that is, the medieval Anglo-Norman settlers in Ireland. Most of the “Old English” intermarried with Irish Gaels and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves” (in the famous phrase applied to them). But others mingled with post-Reformation English settlers—that is, the “New English”—to form the basis of the Irish Anglican Ascendancy during its seventeenth- through nineteenth-century heyday.15 At first, the Ascendancy regarded themselves as thoroughly English, but over time debate grew (among themselves and with others) over how Irish—or how English—members of this group were. This book is comprised of case studies which, overall, suggest that the great Irish Anglican writers were more Irish and less straightforwardly English than is often suggested—even in the case of writers who were either born or spent some of their formative years in England, such as writers covered in Chaps. 3 (Dion Boucicault), 4 (Maria Edgeworth), and 5 (C.S. Lewis). This unexpectedly large quotient of Irishness explains the question mark at the end

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of this Introduction’s title. It also explains my reluctance to use the contentious and slippery term “Anglo-Irish,” which (as noted above) has often been used to imply that the writers in question are effectively English and which is frequently and unhelpfully associated primarily—or even exclusively—with upper-class Big House residents. I am following important contemporary critics such as Jarlath Killeen, Michael Griffin, and Michael Brown in employing the term “Irish Anglican,” which is more accommodating of class differences but which is still sufficiently forensic, in that it specifically indicates writers from Church of Ireland backgrounds.16 Of course, just because most of the Irish Anglican writers explored in this study were less English than is often suggested, that does not mean they were not, on some level, British. And here, I must make clear what I mean by Britishness: I am referring to the common culture and political identity shared by English, Scottish, and Welsh people, as well as certain inhabitants (mainly members of particular Protestant communities) on the island of Ireland. As Michael Gardiner has explained, “Britishness” was heavily promoted by the Scots after the Acts of Union of 1707 (which tied Scotland to England and Wales); the Scots were hoping to create a supranational identity that accommodated all of the countries in the United Kingdom.17 When Ireland joined the United Kingdom after the Acts of Union of 1800, they too became technically “British.” However, as Gardiner also notes, the whole concept of Britishness was effectively hijacked by the English who came to treat “Britishness” and “Englishness” as roughly the same thing.18 The degree to which the English were successful in this endeavour can be seen across popular culture today: for example, when a character on an American police procedural drama says that the assailant had a “British accent,” they clearly mean an English accent—not that the criminal sounded as if they were from the Welsh valleys, or the mean streets of Motherwell, or the Shankill Road in Belfast. The frustration over this conflating of “Britishness” and “Englishness” has manifested itself in many ways, including the drive for greater devolution or even independence in Scotland and Wales and the clear link between Brexit and the resurrection of a specifically English nationalism. As members of a community with profound ties to both Ireland and Britain, Irish Anglicans have been—over the centuries—relatively confused as to how much to embrace “Britishness.” Some eighteenth-century Irish Anglican figures such as Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Elizabeth Griffith, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan occasionally (if sometimes

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tentatively) employed the words “British” or “Briton” in their writings even before Ireland joined the Union, as if trying out the suitability of this ancient but now re-purposed identity.19 The degree to which Irish Anglican writers in the “long” eighteenth-century were happy to be called English (as a signal of their ties to the imperial centre) varied in each individual case and lessened over time. For example, Swift was very happy to describe the Irish population as composed of “Irish Papists” and (his own) “English Protestants,” and Sir Richard Steele described himself as “an Englishman born in the City of Dublin.”20 By contrast, later in the century, Richard Brinsley Sheridan would only admit to being English in moments of extreme duress, when his loyalty was in doubt due to his consorting with Irish rebels or his espousing of radical principles.21 Likewise, Sheridan’s contemporary Maria Edgeworth primarily identified as Irish during her adult life (despite being born in England and spending twelve of her first fourteen years there), but would occasionally depict herself as “one neither born nor bred in Ireland,” in order to “convince English readers of her impartiality in championing Ireland.”22 Later, post-Union, Irish Anglican figures such as Bernard Shaw and Edith Somerville can be seen accepting (with different degrees of happiness) that they were both Irish and British. However, they certainly did not feel that they were English. Shaw once wrote, “I never think of an Englishman as my countryman. I should as soon apply that term to a German.”23 Similarly, while Somerville could grudgingly admit to being British, she always flatly denied being English. In a letter to her English-­ educated brother Jack, she angrily answered his assertion that he “increasingly feels more English than Irish” with the following retort: Nonsense about being ‘English’! I don’t mind if you say ‘British’ if you like, but the only pallid trickle of English blood comes from one marriage, when Hester Coghill married Colonel Tobias Cramer, a pure blooded hun—if not Jew! You might just as well say you were German! … My family has eaten Irish food and shared Irish life for 300 years, and if that doesn’t make me Irish I might as well say I was Scotch, or Norman, or pre-Diluvian!24

This sense of being on some level British but definitely not English seems to have persisted among Irish Anglicans from all parts of the island in the decades after the twenty-six counties got their independence from Britain in 1922. This distinction was important to a writer covered in this book who had profound ties to the part of Ireland which still remains under

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British rule: the Belfast-born C.S.  Lewis. Lewis—like many Ulster Anglicans both before and after independence—acknowledged his Britishness, while also self-identifying as (in his words) “Irish, not English.”25 As for the Church of Ireland writers from the twenty-six counties who emerged in the decades after independence (such as Samuel Beckett, discussed in multiple chapters in this book, and the aforementioned Leland Bardwell), they had to come to terms with the lingering “British” aspects of their identities while belonging to a state that was openly promoting a thoroughly “Irish-Ireland.”26 Of course, all I am really suggesting in the preceding paragraphs is that Irish Anglicans have historically possessed a marked degree of cultural “hybridity”—specifically, Irish/British hybridity. As Homi Bhabha and other postcolonial critics have explained, the social, cultural, and political interactions between colonisers and the residents of a colony results in a new “hybrid” culture being born, which is a mix of the native culture and the occupier’s culture.27 These critics rightly point out that it is never possible for the populace of a colony—even post-independence—to return to the “pre-colonial Eden,” completely free from the influence of the coloniser. That said, within the context of this study, it is important to note that such cultural and political hybridity is significantly more profound in the case of groups that have served as a “middle nation” between the colonial power and the colony—such as the Anglophone Christian “Anglo-­ Indians” in colonial India, the Francophone Catholic Vietnamese elite in colonial Vietnam, or—indeed—Irish Anglicans in colonial Ireland.28 This book is effectively an examination of the various ways in which Irish Anglican writers have signalled (consciously or subconsciously) their Irish/British hybridity. As noted above, despite the cultural and political hegemony of England and later the United Kingdom over Ireland (and, after 1922, over the six counties), Irish Anglican writers have been reluctant to completely surrender their Irishness, even if in some cases—as will be discussed in relation to the writers covered in Chap. 3 (Dion Boucicault, Bram Stoker, and Erskine Childers)—proud Irishness was sometimes subordinated when seeking success as a writer in England. And, of course, so many of the great Irish Anglican writers down through the centuries have chosen to pursue success in England (usually by actually moving there). This tendency to look to England—and often specifically London—as the place to “make it” is clearly a sign of the Irish/ British hybridity of Irish Anglicans.29 After all, this tie to the imperial centre (or post-independence, the former imperial centre) has been noticeably

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less strong for Irish writers from Roman Catholic backgrounds. Consider the attraction to Paris exhibited by George Moore, Hannah Lynch, James Joyce, Thomas McGreevy, Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey, Brendan Behan, John Montague, Julia O’Faolain, and other Catholic writers.30 (Of course, Paris has also provided solace to the occasional, renegade Irish Anglican: most notably, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Synge, Somerville & Ross, and Samuel Beckett.) In discussing Irish Anglican writers in England, this study will return again and again to the idea that many English-based, Irish Anglican writers viewed the populace of the country they moved to with a critical, outsider’s eye. This is central to discussions of the writers examined in Chaps. 2 (Elizabeth Griffith) and 5 (C.S.  Lewis), as well as the other English-­ based, Irish Anglican writers touched upon in various chapters. However, the ability of Irish Anglican writers to accurately assess and at times lampoon perceived weaknesses in the English “national character” speaks once again to their Irish/British hybridity.31 As will be seen from numerous examples given in this book, these Irish Anglican writers were— because of their political, religious, cultural, and in most cases familial ties to Britain—“peripheral insiders” (to quote Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy).32 That is, they were close enough to the English to spot their strengths and weaknesses, but the fact that they were not fully accepted by their English hosts gave them the “detachment” that Elizabeth Bowen and others have suggested is a key feature of Irish Anglican writing.33 Despite the arguments I have advanced above, some readers may harbour lingering doubts that Irish Anglicans can be significantly differentiated from other Protestants on the island of Ireland. As such, I will further demonstrate the uniqueness of the Irish Anglican cultural and socio-­ political position by briefly contrasting them with Ulster Scots Presbyterians—a group with which they are frequently conflated in discussions of both “Irish Protestants” and what David Trimble calls the “Ulster-British.”34 Ulster Scots Presbyterians, because of their relative lack of rights under the Penal Laws, were heavily involved in the 1798 Rebellion against British rule. However, upon being given more rights and receiving more explicit backing from British governments in the wake of “the ’98,” most Ulster Scots traded Irish patriotism for diehard British loyalty. This loyalty grew to the extent that many of them today claim to be British but not in any way Irish (or even “Northern Irish,” a potentially less contentious option

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available on the British Census since the national identity question was added in 2011). Given the fervent Britishness of most Ulster Scots since the early nineteenth century, some might question why the term “middle nation” was not and is not also applied to them. Quite simply, the relationship between Ulster Scots and the centre of English/British government in London has always been more anxious than the relationship between Irish Anglicans and London. This anxiety has its roots in the rocky start to the relationship (i.e. the aforementioned reduced rights available to Dissenters under the Penal Laws); however, it also relates to several other factors which have made the British establishment “trust” Irish Anglicans more. Most notably, Irish Anglicans’ primary association is with England (despite many members of the community also having roots in Wales and lowland Scotland), whereas Ulster Scots have always had a stronger tie to (peripheral) Scotland. Irish Anglicans have been primarily Anglophone for centuries, while Ulster Scots have—of course—also spoken the Ulster dialect of Scots. (Both communities have spoken varying degrees of Irish over the centuries.) Socially exalted members of the Irish Anglican community were (and, in a handful of cases, still are) members of the hegemonic British aristocracy, and have often educated their children—especially their sons—at English public schools. These contrasting positions with regard to the imperial center have affected how Ulster Scots self-identify in contrast to Irish Anglicans. As noted above, most Irish Anglicans (including many in Ulster, past and present) have found it relatively easy to acknowledge that they are both Irish and British—a clear sign of their profound Irish/British hybridity. Ulster Scots Presbyterians, on the other hand, have had a tendency to be more extreme in how they self-identify: that is, they have been more likely to identify as “Irish only” or “British only” when compared to Irish Anglicans. As Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley have noted: “The Church of Ireland constituency … has always worn its Unionism or Nationalism more lightly than has the Ulster Scot dissenting tradition.”35 Similarly, John Wilson Foster states that the “Ulster Protestants” who become full-­ blown “Irish republicans” are “especially” likely to be “Presbyterians.”36 And he observes that—among the Irish Anglicans who do disavow their Britishness—there is the “recurring” phenomenon of the “Anglican … who identifies with the ‘Irish’” having “mixed or obscure” (often highly personal) “motives” for doing so, as opposed to abstract political ones.37 As we can see, even when Irish Anglicans attempt to “overcome” their

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hybridity, they do so in a way that is distinctive and arguably a further sign of their “detachment” from other Irish and British demographics. I will conclude this Introduction with reflections on why it might be important at this time to examine works by “old, dead, white Protestants.” First, I must note that some of the women writers covered here have received significantly less critical attention than they deserve—especially Elizabeth Griffith, Mary Balfour (covered in Chap. 4), and Leland Bardwell. And the other women writers have often been unjustly marginalised in critical studies which should have foregrounded them—especially Charlotte Brooke and Lady Gregory. Similarly, some of the male writers covered have received relatively little critical attention within Irish Studies due to the widespread perception that their literary work belongs exclusively to the English canon. I refer, of course, to Erskine Childers and C.S.  Lewis, but also to two writers touched upon in multiple chapters, George Farquhar and Laurence Sterne. “Tilting the lens” to view the Irish Anglican literary tradition from the vantage point of writers usually seen as outliers within the Irish canon (or as not belonging to it at all) casts new light on the authors routinely explored in the existing criticism. That includes the famous figures whose work is examined in extended discussions in this book, such as—among others—Swift, Goldsmith, Edgeworth, Boucicault, Wilde, Shaw, Yeats, Beckett, and (the Roman Catholic) Joyce. A second reason for examining the work of Irish Anglican writers relates to the implications of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. That landmark accord emphasised that it was possible for someone born on the island of Ireland to be both Irish and British, and this gave Irish Unionists from Irish Anglican, Ulster Scots Presbyterian, or other backgrounds the ability to internally and publicly acknowledge their hybridity.38 As numerous recent commentators have rightly pointed out, if there is ever going to be a united Ireland (whether due to forces unleashed by Brexit or changing demographics in Northern Ireland), the success of the new thirty-two-­ county state will depend on the degree to which Ulster Unionists are allowed to maintain a degree of Britishness.39 A settlement which forces them to forsake or sublimate their ties to the neighbouring island will be neither peaceful nor just, in that it will not take into account the hybrid cultural identity of a sizable minority of the nation’s citizens. Exploring the Irish/British hybridity of the Irish Anglican writers covered in this study will help us to understand how that hybridity has manifested itself historically, and it may even convince narrow-gauge Irish Nationalists that a degree of Britishness does not completely nullify a person’s Irishness.

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This brings me to the third important reason for looking at writers from this demographic. Ulster Unionists (including those from Irish Anglican backgrounds) are not the only people on the island of Ireland who are culturally hybrid. Since the mid-1990s, significant numbers of people have been moving to Ireland from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.40 If it is frequently hinted by “true Gaels” that Irish Protestant families who have been in Ireland for hundreds of years are “not really Irish,” then what hope do Chinese-Irish, Nigerian-Irish, Brazilian-Irish, Polish-Irish, and other “New Irish” people have in becoming assimilated? By becoming more open to the cultural hybridity of Irish Anglicans, Ireland will be better equipped to become an intercultural space—that is, a country in which the minority hybrid cultures and the majority Gaelic Catholic culture are enriched through dialogue and cultural exchange. The same reasoning applies to Ireland’s attempts to forge a deeper relationship with its large Diaspora. In Ireland, it is common for tourists of Irish descent from the Americas, Britain, Australasia, and elsewhere to be mocked for the ways in which they are lacking in “authentic” Irishness. This lack is only to be expected: they are part Irish and part something else. Having the same cultural starting point and touchstones as someone born and raised on the island of Ireland was never a possibility for them. But, just as greater understanding of the Irish/British hybridity of Irish Anglicans might help ease acceptance of the “New Irish,” it might also help Irish-born people to understand the hyphenated Irishness of Irish-­ Americans, Irish-Canadians, Irish-Argentinians, Irish-Australians, Irish-­ New Zealanders, and the like. And, of course, it will be especially helpful in helping Irish people to understand the London Irish, the Liverpool Irish, the Manchester Irish, the Glasgow Irish, the Cardiff Irish, and so on. These folks, after all, have a unique Irish/British hybridity of their own. Ultimately, thanks to evolving attitudes regarding the nature of personal identity, it might prove easier for Irish people from Gaelic Catholic backgrounds to accept the “hyphenated Irishness” of people descended from historically oppressed “races”/ethnicities/nations and of people descended from Irish Catholic forebears forced out of Ireland by financial hardship and/or political banishment. This is because Irish Anglicans— like all members of “middle nations,” including the aforementioned Anglo-Indians and Franco-Vietnamese—are constantly viewed with suspicion by their neighbours. In the cases of all such groups, the second country providing them with a hybrid identity is the historic oppressor. What’s

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more, it is believed that a person could only have “become” a member of that “middle nation” if one or more of their ancestors collaborated with the forces of occupation or else “took the soup” (i.e. converted to the oppressor’s religion for personal gain). These factors explain why, in Edna Longley’s famous words, Irish Protestants have to “work their passage to Irishness.”41 As you read the chapters that follow, I hope it will become clear that each of the Irish Anglican writers explored had quite a complicated relationship with Britain (usually more specifically with England). Yes, each of them was heir to a cultural hybridity which was passed down to them by their British-affiliated forebears, but their relationship with the neighbouring island was also marked by discord. This discord takes different forms, depending on the writer in question. Many of these writers supported (depending on the era within which they were working) legislative independence or Home Rule or even full independence for Ireland, and they could therefore be quite scathing about the English and about the English (later British) government’s mishandling of Ireland. Others remained either dedicatedly or nominally Unionist, but still cast a cold eye on the English in their work. And still others regarded themselves as proudly Irish, but nevertheless made the painful choice to suppress their Irishness because they felt that they had to if they were to attain significant success (or simply make a living) in England. What becomes clear is that most of the writers covered in this study were significantly more Irish than they are usually given credit for and that they were far from evil collaborators, cynically and proudly upholding an unjust political and economic system. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that the aspects of Britishness most appreciated by these Irish Anglican writers—interest in: (1) the great English writers, (2) British sport, (3) the fortunes of the British royal family, and (4) the history and culture of Britain’s “Celtic Fringe” (Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and the Isle of Man)—are similar to the British interests of many Irish people from Gaelic Catholic backgrounds today.42 After all, if we accept the analysis of Bhabha and other postcolonial critics, then we must acknowledge that all residents of Ireland are subject to Irish/British hybridity, even if each demographic is subject to it in varying degrees. I must make clear that I am not using this study to promote a conscious or even unthinking “West Britonism” among Irish people. I am simply suggesting that the lazy (and sectarian) implication that the writers covered in this study were 100% British due to their Church of Ireland backgrounds and that the “true Gaels of Ireland” are 0% British due to their

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Roman Catholic backgrounds is nonsense. The chapters that follow—by exploring separate and specific, but still highly relevant, topics in depth— will provide a nuanced understanding of the actual Irish/British hybridity of these Irish Anglican writers. That includes the degree to which they were proudly Irish and the degree to which they proved Elizabeth Bowen’s interesting contention that Irish Anglicans are prone to a reflexive and at times startlingly strong “anti-Englishness.”43

Notes 1. Behan, Complete Plays, 143. 2. Behan, Letters, 54. 3. Behan, Brendan Behan’s Island, 18. 4. Ibid. 5. Behan, Letters, 54. 6. Ibid. 7. Stephens’s parents were married in a Presbyterian church, but he primarily attended Church of Ireland services after the early death of his father and his admission to the Meath Protestant Industrial School. 8. See, for example, Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 136; Emerson, “Remember the Third Tribe of Ulster”; Park, “A Religious Revolution is Taking Place in Ireland”; Haughey, “Nigerians are Flocking to Their Own Churches”; Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 25, 113, 117–119, 123, 135. The portions of Lyons’s book cited are the ones in which he demonstrates keen awareness of the importance of denominational differences in Ireland, including or especially in the North. However, it should be noted that he, like so many commentators, frequently engages in the (strategic or unconscious?) eliding of denominational differences when discussing the demographics he labels “Anglo-Ireland” and “Protestant Ulster.” 9. For Bardwell’s contrasting use of “Anglo-Irish” for upper-class Anglicans and “Protestants” for middle- and working-class Anglicans, see, for example, Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 35, 36, 65, 69, 92. 10. For recent works, see Nuttal, Different and the Same; Dawe, Sound of the Shuttle; d’Alton and Milne, eds., Protestant and Irish; Wood Richardson, Smyllie’s Ireland; Morrissey, Protestant Nationalists in Ireland; Bury, Buried Lives; Parr, Inventing the Myth; Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, Chapter Three; Walker, Political History of the Two Irelands; Crawford, Outside the Glow. For older seminal works by the critics named, see Beckett, Anglo-Irish Tradition; Brown, “The Church of Ireland: Some Literary Perspectives”; Brown, Whole Protestant Community; Brown, “Religious Minorities in the

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Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland 1922–1995”; McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition; McCormack, From Burke to Beckett; Dawe and Longley, Introduction to Across the Roaring Hill; Longley, “Anglo-Irish Resurrection”; Longley, “What Do Protestants Want?”; R.F. Foster, “Varieties of Irishness”; R.F. Foster, Paddy & Mr Punch, Chapter 11; Tracy, Unappeasable Host. As regards Vivien Mercier and John Wilson Foster, there are important reflections on Protestant writers—including what they refer to as “Anglo-Irish” writers—in Mercier, “Victorian Evangelicalism and the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival”; Mercier, Beckett/ Beckett; Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition; J.W. Foster, Colonial Consequences; J.W. Foster, Irish Novels 1890–1940; J.W. Foster, Between Shadows. Other significant interventions that pre-date the current (post-2010) explosion of interest in Irish Protestants include—among others—Inglis, West Briton; Viney, The Five Per Cent; White, Minority Report; Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland; Bowen, Protestants in a Catholic State; Sloan, Writers and Protestantism in the North of Ireland; Murphy and Adair, eds., Untold Stories. 11. In Ireland, the word “Protestant” was originally used exclusively for members of the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland, but, over the past two centuries, it has come to refer to people from any reformed Christian sect and that is how I will be using the term in this book. 12. It should be noted here that Irish Anglicans were not actually dubbed “the Ascendancy” until the late eighteenth century. (See McCormack, From Burke to Beckett, 62–63.) 13. The Irish Church Act, which disestablished the Church of Ireland, was passed by the British parliament in 1869, but only came into force on 1 January 1871. This act is often described as having “separated” the Church of Ireland from the Church of England. However, as I discuss elsewhere, the Church of Ireland always maintained a degree of independence from the Anglican Communion’s “mother church,” the Church of England. (Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 136.) 14. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Gael, 13. 15. Lydon, “The Middle Nation.” 16. For more on the benefits of using “Irish Anglican” over “Anglo-Irish” (or the overly imprecise “Irish Protestant”), see Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 136. For a brief but excellent discussion of the slipperiness of the term “Anglo-Irish,” see Conradi, “Iris Murdoch’s Deep but Twisted Irish Roots.” My use of the term “Irish Anglican” should not lead readers to conclude that I will be addressing issues related to Anglican doctrine or liturgy. Indeed, not all of the writers featured were orthodox believers in Christianity or the Anglican articles of faith. Instead, I am using the term

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to signal a writer’s membership of a particular Irish community. (As must already be clear, the same is true of my use of, for example, “Irish Gaelic Catholic” and “Ulster Scots Presbyterian.”) Using a religiously “loaded” term to identify each community makes sense, given that the faith one is born into has such a strong impact on where one fits in Irish society. For example, as a result of the clerical sex abuse scandals and evolving views on gender, sexuality, divorce, and so on, many Irish people from Catholic backgrounds have stopped attending Mass; and yet, they still identify as Catholic and would be very reluctant to identify as Protestant, even if they still believe in Christianity’s central doctrines and possess a personal, selfdetermined theology which is effectively “Protestant.” Such a dynamic around identity is even more pronounced in Northern Ireland, where membership of the PUL (Protestant Unionist Loyalist) community or the CNR (Catholic Nationalist Republican) community does not require confessions of faith and where the sociopolitical gulf between the communities has remained quite strong. That said, there has been a marked increase in the number of people identifying as neither Orange nor Green, as evidenced by the growing popularity of the Alliance Party. 17. Gardiner, Cultural Roots of British Devolution, 14–15. 18. Ibid. 19. Swift, “An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities, in the City of Dublin,” 167–168, 171, 175; Goldsmith, Letters, 19; Griffith, The Times, vii; Sheridan, as quoted in O’Toole, Traitor’s Kiss, 217. 20. Swift, Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 141; Steele, as quoted in Dobson, Richard Steele, 1. Emphasis in original. 21. O’Toole, Traitor’s Kiss, 331. 22. Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, 122; Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 141. 23. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 11. 24. As quoted in Oakman, “Sitting on ‘The Outer Skin’,” 134. Emphasis in original letter. For more on this letter, see Lewis, Edith Somerville, 13. Somerville mentions “Scotch” and “Norman” because her Norman-­ descended Somerville ancestors originally came to Ireland from Scotland in the seventeenth century. Her Doyle ancestors were, as their surname suggests, originally Gaelic Catholics. For a discussion of the fact that many of the major Irish Anglican writers actually had some Gaelic Catholic ancestors, see Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 48–50. 25. For this quote and several other instances of Lewis self-identifying as Irish (as well as discussions of his Britishness), see Clare, “C.S.  Lewis,” 20, 23–24. 26. For more on the “British” aspects of Beckett’s identity and work, see Clare, “Anglo-Irish ‘Distortion’.”

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27. For an overview of the concept of “hybridity” within a postcolonial context, see Bhabha, Location of Culture, 5, 83. For other perspectives on the concept of “hybridity,” see, for example, Prabhu, Hybridity; Kuortti and Nyman, eds., Reconstructing Hybridity; Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory, 114–151. While this book engages with postcolonial theory, it is important to note that Ireland is an “anomalous state” within Postcolonial Studies. (Lloyd, Anomalous States.) This is because, while the country was historically treated as a colony by the English, it was also, through the Acts of Union, part of the British imperial centre, conspiring (especially through its significant representation in the British armed forces and colonial services) in the subjugation of other colonies. My acknowledging of this tension is implicit in my discussions of “levels” of Britishness found in different portions of the Irish population and individual Irish people. For important studies complicating the application of postcolonial theory to Ireland, see Graham, Deconstructing Ireland; Connolly, “The Limits of ‘Irish Studies’.” 28. Other groups of this kind include, for example, the Indo people of Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies), the Anglo-Burmese in Myanmar (formerly Burma), the Burgher people in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), and the Kristang people of Malaysia and Singapore. It should be noted that, for much of the time that Vietnam was part of French Indochina, it was split into three regions (Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina) and administratively linked by the French to Cambodia, Laos, and the Chinese territory Guangzhouwan. 29. For “Micks on the make” in London, see R.F. Foster, Paddy & Mr Punch, Chapter 14. 30. It should be noted that, although Hannah Lynch was raised Catholic, she flirted with Protestantism while living in Paris as an adult. (See Binckes and Laing, Hannah Lynch, 16.) 31. For more on the importance of and the limitations associated with the idea of “national character” (Irish, English, and British) within an Irish literature context, see Deane, “Irish National Character, 1790–1900.” I should note, however, that Deane often conflates notions of English and British national character, even when it is clear that a non-English commentator like Edmund Burke is attempting to describe a version of the British national character that accommodates the traits of all four countries in the Atlantic Archipelago (traditionally the “British Isles”). 32. Griffin and O’Shaughnessy, Introduction to The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, lxi. 33. Bowen, “We Write Novels,” 25. 34. As quoted in Sloan, Writers and Protestantism, 80. 35. Dawe and Longley, Introduction to Across the Roaring Hill, v.

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36. Foster, Between Shadows, 247. 37. Ibid., 167. 38. For signs that the Good Friday Agreement has helped inspire Ulster Unionists and Loyalists to explore the Irish side of their identities, witness the increased interest shown in the Irish language and the Gaelic Athletic Association by the PUL population of East Belfast. See Ervine, “Linda Ervine: I realised Irish belonged to me – a Protestant – and I fell in love with it”; Young, “Linda Ervine to be President of new east Belfast GAA club.” 39. For astute discussions of this, see McDonagh, “Parity of Esteem for Britishness Essential for Any United Ireland”; Emerson, “A New Ireland, or Just a Bigger Republic?” Fintan O’Toole rightly notes, however, that English Nationalists are showing less and less interest in Britishness, which could have far-reaching implications for Unionists in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. See O’Toole, “Demand for Britishness is High but the Supply is Drying Up.” 40. This is not to suggest—as many do—that Ireland was “racially” and ethnically homogenous prior to the mid-1990s. I am not simply referring to the groups who arrived in significant numbers from Europe over the centuries, whether Celts, Vikings, Normans (after a century in England and Wales), Armada Spaniards, continental Jews, Huguenots, German Palatines, and— in the 1950s—Hungarian refugees. As Bob Quinn has shown, there are North African survivals in Irish music and visual art. (Quinn, Atlantean Irish.) And there have been black people in Ireland for centuries. (Hart, “Africans in Eighteenth-Century Ireland.”) What’s more, historian Liam Hogan has found several accounts in newspapers “of Irish immigrants in the U.S. in the 19th and early 20th century who were black or mixed race,” including “some [who] were gaeilgeoirí” (i.e. Irish-speaking). (See Hogan, “Irish Links to Transatlantic Slavery.”) One must also point out the numerous, famous Irish people of colour raised in the country in the decades prior to the mid-1990s, including politicians such as Éamon de Valera (half-Cuban) and Leo Varadkar (halfIndian), sports figures such as Paul McGrath (half-Nigerian) and Jason Sherlock (half-Chinese), musicians such as Phil Lynott (half-Guayanese) and Samatha Mumba (half-Zambian), actors such as Ruth Negga (halfEthiopian) and Yasmine Akram (half-Pakistani), writers such as Ursula Rani Sarma (half-­Indian) and Emma Dabiri (half-Nigerian), presenters such as Liz Bonnin (of mixed West Indian, South Asian, and Portuguese descent) and Baz Ashmawy (half-Egyptian), and activists such as Christine Buckley (half-Nigerian) and Lorraine Maher (also half-Nigerian). In terms of activism, one might also note the Fijian-Irish hurler Seán Óg Ó hAilpín, who fought hard on behalf of the players in what were effectively labour

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disputes with the Cork county board between 2002 and 2009 and who has also—like several of the other figures named above—been heavily involved in diversity and anti-racism initiatives in Ireland. 41. Longley, “Anglo-Irish Resurrection,” 106. 42. For Ireland’s continuing and quite strong interest in the British royal family, see O’Driscoll, “Ireland’s Complicated Fascination with the Royals”; Ferriter, “Why the Interest in the Royal Birth?” For interest in British sport among the writers discussed in this study, consider Beckett’s fascination with English cricket and tennis. (Leland Bardwell’s father also had an extremely keen interest in English cricket, as she notes in Bardwell, Restless Life, 87.) And it goes without saying that contemporary Ireland’s wider population has a very deep interest in English and Scottish football. 43. Bowen, “The Idea of France,” 63. It should be noted that Bowen suggests that this “anti-Englishness” is often expressed in a “subtle” manner and is usually “apolitical.” (Ibid., 63.) And she elsewhere notes the deep-­seated “ambivalence to all things English” prevalent among Irish Anglicans. (Bowen, “Coming to London,” 86.) Bowen brilliantly captures this “subtle”—and occasionally not-so-subtle—“anti-Englishness” through her depiction of Lady Myra Naylor in her 1929 novel The Last September.

References Bardwell, Leland. Girl on a Bicycle. Dublin: Liberties, 2009. Print. Bardwell, Leland. A Restless Life. Dublin: Liberties, 2008. Print. Beckett, J.C. The Anglo-Irish Tradition. London: Faber & Faber, 1976. Print. Behan, Brendan. Brendan Behan’s Island: An Irish Sketch-book. London: Geiss, 1962. Print. Behan, Brendan. The Complete Plays. New York: Grove, 1978. Print. Behan, Brendan. The Letters of Brendan Behan. Ed. E.H.  Mikhail. London: Macmillan, 1992. Print. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print. Binckes, Faith, and Kathryn Laing. Hannah Lynch 1859–1904: Irish Writer, Cosmopolitan, New Woman. Cork: Cork UP, 2019. Print. Bowen, Elizabeth. “Coming to London.” In The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Hermione Lee. London: Virago, 1986. 85–89. Print. Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Idea of France.” In People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. 61–65. Print. Bowen, Elizabeth. “We Write Novels: An Interview with Walter Allen.” In The Weight of a World of Feeling: Reviews and Essays by Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2017. 24–29. Print.

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Bowen, Kurt. Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1983. Print. Brown, Terence. “The Church of Ireland: Some Literary Perspectives.” Search 3.2 (1980): 5–19. Print. Brown, Terence. “Religious Minorities in the Irish Free State and the Republic of Ireland 1922–1995.” In Building Trust in Ireland: Studies Commissioned by the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1995. 215–253. Print. Brown, Terence. The Whole Protestant Community: The Making of a Historical Myth. Derry: Field Day, 1985. Print. Bury, Robin. Buried Lives: The Protestants of Southern Ireland. Dublin: History Press, 2017. Print. Clare, David. “Anglo-Irish ‘Distortion’: Double-Exposure in Francis Bacon’s Portraits and Beckett’s The Old Tune.” New Hibernia Review 22.1 (2018): 102–119. Print. Clare, David. Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print. Clare, David. “C.S.  Lewis: An Irish Writer.” Irish Studies Review 18.1 (2010): 17–38. Print. Connolly, Linda. “The Limits of ‘Irish Studies’: Historicism, Culturalism, Paternalism.” Irish Studies Review 12.2 (2004): 139–162. Print. Conradi, Peter J. “Iris Murdoch’s Deep but Twisted Irish Roots.” The Irish Times 13 July 2019. Print. Crawford, Heather. Outside the Glow: Protestants and Irishness in Independent Ireland. Dublin: UCD Press, 2010. Print. d’Alton, Ian, and Ida Milne, eds. Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s Search for a Place in Independent Ireland. Cork: Cork UP, 2019. Print. Dawe, Gerald. The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging & Protestantism in Northern Ireland. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020. Print. Dawe, Gerald, and Edna Longley. Introduction to Across the Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland. Eds. Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley. Belfast: Blackstaff, 1985. i–xiii. Print. Deane, Seamus. “Irish National Character, 1790–1900.” In The Writer as Witness: Literature as Historical Evidence. Ed. Tom Dunne. Cork: Cork UP, 1986. 90–113. Print. Dobson, Austin. Richard Steele. London: Longman, Green, and Co., 1888. Print. Edgeworth, Maria. An Essay on Irish Bulls. Dublin: UCD Press, 2006. Print. Emerson, Newton. “A New Ireland, or Just a Bigger Republic?” The Irish Times 8 August 2019. Print. Emerson, Newton. “Remember the Third Tribe of Ulster.” The Irish Times 31 August 2017. Print. Ervine, Linda. “Linda Ervine: I realised Irish belonged to me – a Protestant – and I fell in love with it.” The Irish News 9 November 2015. Print.

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Ferriter, Diarmuid. “Why the Interest in the Royal Birth?” The Irish Times 2 May 2015. Print. Foster, John Wilson. Between Shadows: Modern Irish Writing and Culture. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009. Print. Foster, John Wilson. Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture. Dublin: Lilliput, 1991. Print. Foster, John Wilson. Irish Novels: 1890–1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Foster, R.F. “Varieties of Irishness.” In Modern Ireland 1600–1972. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1988. 3–14. Print. Foster, R.F. Paddy & Mr Punch: Connections in Irish History and English History. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1993. Print. Gardiner, Michael. The Cultural Roots of British Devolution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. Print. Goldsmith, Oliver. The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith. Eds. Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. Print. Graham, Colin. Deconstructing Ireland: Identity, Theory, Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001. Print. Griffin, Michael, and David O’Shaughnessy. Introduction to The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, by Oliver Goldsmith. Eds. Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. xv–lxii. Print. Griffith, Elizabeth. The Times. London: Fielding & Walker et al., 1780. Print. Hart, W.A. “Africans in Eighteenth-Century Ireland.” Irish Historical Studies 33.129 (2002): 19–32. Print. Haughey, Nuala. “Nigerians are Flocking to Their Own Churches.” The Irish Times 28 October 2002. Print. Hogan, Liam. “Irish Links to Transatlantic Slavery.” threader.app. Twitter Thread App, 19 October 2018. Web. 17 August 2020. Inglis, Brian. West Briton. London: Faber & Faber, 1962. Print. Kuortti, Joel, and Jopi Nyman, eds. Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-colonial Studies in Transition. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Print. Leerssen, Joep. Mere Irish and Fíor-Gael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork UP, 1996. Print. Lewis, Gifford. Edith Somerville: A Biography. Dublin: Four Courts, 2005. Print. Lloyd, David. Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print. Longley, Edna. “Anglo-Irish Resurrection.” Honest Ulsterman 82 (1986): 102–108. Print. Longley, Edna. “What Do Protestants Want?” Études irlandaises (1996): 65–83. Print.

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Lydon, James. “The Middle Nation.” In The English in Medieval Ireland. Ed. James Lydon. Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1984. 1–26. Print. Lyons, F.S.L. Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, 1890–1939. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979. Print. McCormack, W.J. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History From 1789 to 1939. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Print. McCormack, W.J. From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History. Cork: Cork UP, 1994. Print. McDonagh, Bobby. “Parity of Esteem for Britishness Essential for Any United Ireland.” The Irish Times 6 June 2019. Print. Mercier, Vivien. “Victorian Evangelicalism and the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival.” In Literature and the Changing Ireland. Ed. Peter Connolly. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982. 59–101. Print. Mercier, Vivien. Beckett/Beckett. London: Souvenir, 1990. Print. Mercier, Vivien. The Irish Comic Tradition. London: Souvenir, 1991. Print. Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso, 1997. Print. Morrissey, Conor. Protestant Nationalists in Ireland, 1900–1923. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Print. Murphy, Colin, and Lynne Adair, eds. Untold Stories: Protestants in the Republic of Ireland, 1922–2002. Dublin: Liffey, 2002. Print. Nuttall, Deirdre. Different and the Same: A Folk History of the Protestants of Independent Ireland. Dublin: Eastwood, 2020. Print. O’Driscoll, Mervyn. “Ireland’s Complicated Fascination with the Royals.” The Irish Examiner 14 June 2018. Print. O’Toole, Fintan. “Demand for Britishness is High but the Supply is Drying Up.” The Irish Times 26 March 2019. Print. O’Toole, Fintan. A Traitor’s Kiss: A Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998. Print. Oakman, Anne. “Sitting on ‘The Outer Skin’: Somerville and Ross’s Through Connemara in a Governess Cart as a Coded Stratum of Linguistic/Feminist ‘Union’ Ideals.” Éire-Ireland 39.1–2 (2004): 110–135. Print. Park, Nick. “A Religious Revolution is Taking Place in Ireland.” The Irish Times 23 May 2017. Print. Parr, Connal. Inventing the Myth: Political Passions and the Ulster Protestant Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2017. Print. Prabhu, Anjali. Hybridity: Limits, Transformations, Prospects. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Print. Quinn, Bob. The Atlantean Irish. Dublin: Lilliput, 2005. Print. Shaw, Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island. London: Penguin, 1984. Print. Sloan, Barry. Writers and Protestantism in the North of Ireland: Heirs to Adamnation? Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000. Print.

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Swift, Jonathan. “An Examination of Certain Abuses, Corruptions, and Enormities, in the City of Dublin.” In Swift’s Irish Pamphlets: An Introductory Selection. Ed. Joseph McMinn. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1991. 163–177. Swift, Jonathan. The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI: The Drapier’s Letters. Ed. Temple Scott. London: Bell, 1903. Print. Tracy, Robert. The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities. Dublin: UCD Press, 1998. Print. Viney, Michael. The Five Per Cent. A Survey of Protestants in the Republic. Dublin: Irish Times, 1965. Print. Walker, Brian M. A Political History of the Two Irelands: From Partition to Peace. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. White, Jack. Minority Report: The Anatomy of the Southern Irish Protestant. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1975. Print. Wood Richardson, Caleb. Smyllie’s Ireland: Protestants, Independence, and The Man Who Ran ‘The Irish Times’. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2019. Print. Young, Connla. “Linda Ervine to be President of new east Belfast GAA club.” The Irish News 3 June 2020. Print.

CHAPTER 2

Elizabeth Griffith: Celebrating and Extending the Irish Anglican Dramatic Tradition

Abstract  Between the late seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, a number of Irish Anglican playwrights found success after moving to London and writing English-set plays which commented archly upon the new country in which they found themselves and which often subtly included Irish subject matter. This line of playwrights is often said to extend from Farquhar and Congreve to Wilde and Shaw, but critics interested in Irish women’s writing have long argued that more women should be included in this pantheon of writers. One Irish female playwright who should certainly be considered part of this dramatic “school” is Elizabeth Griffith; in her five major plays which debuted in London between 1765 and 1779, she too examined the English with a critical, outsider’s eye and commented on Irish socio-political matters. Griffith should also be seen as part of this Irish Anglican dramatic tradition because she was very conscious of writing within that tradition. Keywords  Elizabeth Griffith • Irish Women’s Writing • Irish Drama • Irish Women Playwrights

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Clare, Irish Anglican Literature and Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68353-5_2

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When critics discuss Irish theatre history in the centuries prior to the 1899 founding of the Irish Literary Theatre (precursor to Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey), they invariably mention the long line of English-­ based, Irish Anglican playwrights which extended “from Congreve and Farquhar in the Restoration Drama, through Goldsmith and Sheridan in the eighteenth century, to Wilde and Shaw at the close of the nineteenth.”1 Critics asserting the Irishness of these playwrights have noted that they commented archly upon the new country within which they found themselves and included Irish subject matter (often rather subtly) in their English-set plays.2 Eighteenth-century Irish playwright Elizabeth Griffith should certainly be included in this important pantheon of writers, because, in her five major plays which debuted in London between 1765 and 1779, she too examined the English with an outsider’s eye and commented—sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely—on Irish socio-­ political matters. Griffith should also be seen as part of this Irish Anglican dramatic tradition, because she was very conscious of writing within that tradition.3 As the survey of her major plays below demonstrates, Griffith repeatedly and playfully alluded to the work of major Irish playwrights in her scripts, but also (on occasion) challenged, expanded on, and updated tropes included in important works by those playwrights.

Griffith’s Background and Early Career Elizabeth Griffith was born in Glamorgan, Wales in 1727, but was raised in Dublin from infancy. At the time of her birth, her father Thomas, who was born into a Welsh family in Dublin, was actor-manager at Dublin’s Smock Alley Theatre, as well as Ireland’s Master of the Revels; her mother Jane (née Foxcroft) was the daughter of a Church of Ireland clergyman based in Portarlington, Queen’s County (today Co. Laois). Thomas Griffith died when Elizabeth was seventeen, but she continued her family’s ties to the theatre: at the age of twenty-two, she made her acting debut on the Smock Alley stage, and she came to fame in the Irish capital playing Juliet opposite Thomas Sheridan’s rather old Romeo. In 1751, Elizabeth secretly married Richard Griffith (no relation), a Kilkenny gentleman who had no money despite coming from an aristocratic family. Elizabeth quickly had two children, and it soon became clear that her gentleman husband was not gifted with the ability to make money. In an effort to improve her family’s shaky financial situation, Elizabeth moved to London alone in 1752, where she planned to draw upon her previous acting

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experience to get work as a thespian in the West End. Unfortunately, Elizabeth only managed to land a handful of minor, low-paying roles at Covent Garden. On the heels of this setback and out of acute financial necessity, she decided to become a writer, and she first gained fame for A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances (1757–1770), which was co-­ written with her husband and based on their actual romantic correspondence. Despite the success of this work, the Griffiths’ financial situation remained extremely perilous. Between 1759 and 1764, they resided together back in cheaper Ireland (in Dublin and Portarlington), but eventually they moved—en masse this time—to London where Elizabeth soon established herself as an important playwright of the day. She would also write successful novels and works of literary criticism, but her most important literary legacy is arguably the vital contribution that she made to the Irish Anglican dramatic tradition.4 If we consider the strength of her best scripts and (as delineated below) her honouring and extending of that important stage tradition, it becomes clear that scholars must not continue to overlook or marginalise her in accounts of Irish theatre history.

The Platonic Wife Griffith’s first staged play, 1765’s The Platonic Wife, is based loosely on Jean François Marmontel’s moral tale L’Heureux Divorce (1761), and it is similar to much of Griffith’s work in that it simultaneously challenges and conforms to late eighteenth-century views on gender. In the play, the eponymous wife, Emilia, leaves her husband, because he is not “emotionally available” to her (as we would put it today); audiences at the time were shocked at the idea of a wife having expectations of her husband—and not simply accepting whatever behaviour he decided to mete out to her. Griffith also commented on gender issues in the play by showing how unsafe the world was for “unattached” females, since Emilia is continually at the mercy of predatory and circling rogues and bounders (who, being men, hold all the cards, power-wise). At the end of the play, Emilia seeks shelter under her husband, and Griffith arguably reinforces certain fixed ideas around gender. However, despite this backing down from thorough proto-feminism, Griffith’s championing of even a limited degree of female agency still clearly unnerved people. The play was greeted by “catcalls and hisses.”5 However, Londoners were still intrigued by the play and it

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actually ran for six nights—a relatively long run by eighteenth-century standards—with the script being published during the run.6 The Platonic Wife’s risky take on gender politics is not the only noteworthy aspect of the play. It is also commendable for its characterisation of the two Irish Catholic lower-class characters—the servant Patrick and his friend Jimmy Kavanagh. As we will see, her characterisations of Patrick and Jimmy show Griffith’s awareness of previous plays by Irish Anglican dramatists which were written for the London stage but which were also very popular at Smock Alley during the tenures of both her father and Thomas Sheridan. (Dublin theatregoers were interested in those plays due to the Irish backgrounds of the playwrights.) However, Griffith also shows a desire in The Platonic Wife to update a key trope from that burgeoning dramatic tradition. By the time Griffith was writing The Platonic Wife, earlier Irish Anglican playwrights had redeemed the dignity of the Irish on the English stage by creating complex, loveable, Irish Protestant middle-class or upper-class heroes. Examples include the male leads from George Farquhar’s Love and A Bottle (1698), Thomas Sheridan’s The Brave Irishman (1738), and Charles Macklin’s The True-Born Irishman (1763). However, when creating Irish Catholic lower-class characters, Irish Anglican playwrights usually created Stage Irish figures that were indistinguishable from the Stage Irishmen created by English playwrights since at least the time of Shakespeare’s MacMorris from Henry V (c. 1599). One need only think of the laughably and improbably stupid Irish Catholic characters created by Farquhar, including Macahone from The Stage-Coach (c. 1701) and Teague from The Twin Rivals (1702). (Even the relatively sympathetic portrait of Mrs. Trudge in Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle is mildly offensive from an Irish Catholic point of view, given that she is rather “dim intellectually.”)7 By contrast, Griffith’s Patrick and Jimmy have significantly more dignity and agency than these and the other Irish lower-class characters created by Griffith’s Irish playwriting predecessors. What’s more, Patrick is used by Griffith to critique England’s harsh treatment of Ireland. During the course of the play, Patrick discovers a duplicitous scheme which could lead to sexual scandal and social ruin for the heroine Emilia. The French woman, Mme. Fontage, is to get one thousand pounds for her part in the scheme, and Patrick, with help from Jimmy, plays a key role in putting a stop to these machinations, thereby saving Emilia from disgrace. Patrick’s heroic behaviour leads to the following exchange at the end of

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the play, in which Griffith expresses her Irish patriotism, as well as her sympathy for the Irish lower-classes: EMILIA. As for you, honest Patrick, I think the least return I can make you, for saving my life and honour, is to present you with the same sum that Fontange was to have had for destroying both. PATRICK.  Heaven bless and prosper your ladyship, for that. Patrick will carry it into his own country, and that itself would be a help to poor Ireland, for every one has a pluck at it, and would be glad to take all they can get from it, and no body never gives it nothing at all.8

The political implications of this exchange make clear that Griffith shared Jonathan Swift’s negative feelings about England’s economic exploitation of Ireland. Indeed, as Clíona Ó Gallchoir has noted, Patrick’s rumination on “poor Ireland” at the end of the play is an onstage manifestation of Griffith’s offstage ties to Ireland’s “vigorous Patriot movement, whose demands for equal treatment for Ireland culminated in 1782 with the achievement of legislative independence for the Irish parliament.”9 While this was the last Griffith play featuring a significant amount of overtly Irish subject matter, she would continue to reveal her views on Anglo-Irish relations and to give indications of her own Irish background in her subsequent, English-set plays.

The Double Mistake Griffith’s next play was one of the biggest successes of her playwriting career. The Double Mistake is an “alteration” of George Digby’s Elvira; or, The Worst was not Always True (“possibly acted in 1664 [and …] published in 1667”); it ran for thirteen nights at Covent Garden in 1766 and was mounted a fourteenth time “by command of their Majesties.”10 The playscript went through three editions that same year. The fact that the play was so successful is arguably rather depressing, given that—as Betty Rizzo and other critics have noted—the heroine “remains passive and long-suffering, contrives no expedients to vindicate herself, and is finally saved only by the unravelling of the subplot.”11 Rizzo wisely supposes that Griffith was making amends for the (admittedly somewhat limited) proto-­ feminism of The Platonic Wife.12 While this entertaining play is certainly problematic from a gender point of view, it does have Irish interest. As with Griffith’s other plays, she

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shows a clear desire to link her work to earlier Irish drama. The heroine, Emily Southerne, takes her surname from the celebrated, Dublin-born, Restoration playwright Thomas Southerne. And, as we shall see, it could be argued that the relations that Emily stays with during the play, the Belmonts, have Irish connections. The most obvious Irish aspect of the Belmont family—besides their blood connection to the Southernes, a family with a name associated with Irishness at the time of the play’s debut—is the fact that one of its members is named for the Irish St. Bridget. While Lady Bridget Belmont could still be from a thoroughly English background (given that the name was also current in England at the time), it is noteworthy that at one point Mr. Southerne, Emily’s father, actually calls her “Biddy”—a diminutive of Bridget historically popular in Ireland and often used as an anti-Irish slur outside of Ireland.13 What’s more, Griffith seems to be overturning old ideas regarding Irish barbarism and English civility by making the character with a name strongly associated with Ireland extremely learned. Lady Mary Belmont says of Lady Bridget: “Your ladyship has given up [her] time to … abstruse and difficult employments, [such as] the study of the learned languages.”14 When Bridget is told by Lord Belmont that she is going to hear something “that will, I hope, both improve, and enlarge the circle of [her] pleasures,” she wonders if it will be “Some improvement … in the Encyclopoedia; there are many sciences yet left imperfect.”15 When hearing that she is to meet the Rev. Lawson’s daughter (it is actually Emily Southerne posing as the vicar’s child), Bridget says: “Her father was a very learned divine, and who can tell but she may understand the rabbinical text? O! if she can but translate the Lexicon, I shall be quite happy.”16 And Bridget even calls the “toilet” the “temple of the graces.”17 As will already be clear, this aspect of Bridget’s character is a source of comedy in the play, but it is still interesting that Griffith is at pains to emphasise the intellect of a character with a strongly Irish name.18 It is also noteworthy that it is a woman who is the most learned character in the play—perhaps Griffith’s attempt to make up for the lack of support for women’s emancipation in other aspects of the script. Another key Irish feature of the play is that, in it, Griffith—as she would in later plays—prominently features London place names that have a “double” in Dublin. In the case of The Double Mistake, those place names are “Temple-Bar” and “Lombard-street.”19 “Temple-Bar” is also mentioned in Griffith’s The School for Rakes (1769), and “Ranelagh” is memorably namechecked in the plays A Wife in the Right (1772) and The Times

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(1779).20 (Ranelagh Gardens in London was named for Ranelagh House, the London home of the Irish Ascendancy family, the Coles, who took their title—the Earls of Ranelagh—from the part of Dublin where they owned an estate, Ranelagh [in Irish, Raghnallach].) This habit of Griffith’s is an indication that she might still have had the audience back at Smock Alley in mind, or—as I have noted elsewhere with regard to Goldsmith and Shaw—that she was similar to many Irish Anglican playwrights over the centuries in her desire to include subtle Irish references in her plays that Irish audience members would be quick to spot, even if English spectators would not.21 While The Double Mistake does not programmatically expand the Irish dramatic tradition in the deliberate way that some of Griffith’s other major plays do, it still arguably influenced subsequent Irish art. In Act One of the play, there is an important conversation between Lord Belmont and Sir Charles Somerville in which they discuss the “triumph” of “passion … over reason.”22 And the English libertine/villain in the play bears the surname Freeman—presumably a simultaneous reference to his Englishness (i.e. “Britons shall never be slaves”), his middle-class status as the son of a banker (i.e. people in the City of London who were historically free to make money without deferring to an aristocratic lord), and his loose, “free and easy” morals. In 1781, Elizabeth Sheridan—the daughter of Thomas and Frances and the sister of Richard Brinsley—would publish a Dublin-­ set novel entitled The Triumph of Passion over Prudence. The “novel’s most negative character” shares a surname with Griffith’s Double Mistake villain: she is called Caroline Freeman, and she “abuses the hospitality, and disrupts the courtship of the novel’s most important characters.”23 By naming the character “Freeman,” Sheridan is clearly suggesting that Caroline, as an Englishwoman, is “free” to do what she likes in a way that the Irish characters are not. And, as Aileen Douglas and Ian Campbell Ross have suggested, the name is also “ironic,” since Caroline is a slave to her “ungovernable passions.”24 Given Griffith’s long-standing ties to the Sheridan family, it seems quite possible that Elizabeth Sheridan was influenced by one of Griffith’s most popular plays, The Double Disguise, when choosing the title of her novel, as well as the surname of its least savoury character.

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The School for Rakes In 1768, Griffith’s The School for Rakes ran for an impressive twelve nights at Drury Lane; further signs of its popularity were that it was published during the run and revived on occasion over the next seven years. The play is an adaptation of Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais’s Eugénie (1767). As Griffith notes in the play’s “Advertisement” (i.e. Preface), she took many liberties in adapting the play: “I … set about adapting it to the English Stage. But, as I proceeded in this work, I found I had great difficulties to encounter; for, though Mons. Beaumarchais had laid the scene of his play in England, he had, unluckily, adopted Spanish manners.”25 Whether or not the manners of Beaumarchais’s play were truly “Spanish” is open to conjecture, but he certainly had imperfect knowledge of England and Wales, the two countries intimately involved in the plot. By contrast, Griffith was well-positioned to make keen observations about those two countries. Her father may have been Dublin-born but his family’s ties to Wales remained strong (as Elizabeth’s own birth in Glamorgan during a family visit to Wales makes clear), and her maternal grandparents may have lived in Portarlington for several decades, but they were originally from Yorkshire. And, of course, Elizabeth herself had been living in England on and off since 1752. In her adaptation of Beaumarchais’s play, Griffith brings the other country associated with her background—and, at the time, with the English crown—into the mix: she has the heroine’s brother come to London from Ireland, where he has been stationed as a colonel in the British Army. Griffith’s contrasting of the English and Welsh in the play is interesting from an Irish Studies point of view on several levels. Most notably as regards Irish drama, the play sees Griffith once again fitting neatly into a key aspect of the work of English-based, Irish Anglican playwrights over centuries. As Marguérite Corporaal and other critics have discussed, Irish playwrights in England have long shown a greater interest in setting works outside of London than many of their English playwriting contemporaries.26 Prominent examples include several plays set (or partially set) in the English provinces, such as Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux Stratagem (1707); Mary Davys’s The Northern Heiress (1718); France Sheridan’s A Trip to Bath (1765);27 Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773); Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and St. Patrick’s Day (1775); Maria Edgeworth’s Old Poz (1796) and Eton Montem (1800);28 Anna Maria Hall’s St. Pierre, the Refugee (1837) and

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Mabel’s Curse (1837); Dion Boucicault’s London Assurance (1841, originally entitled Out of Town); Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895); and numerous Bernard Shaw plays from all phases of his career including—among many others—You Never Can Tell (1897), Heartbreak House (1919), and Village Wooing (1933).29 While Griffith’s play is set in London, the constant conversations about Wales (and often specifically Monmouthshire) link the work to plays by Irish Anglican playwrights who demonstrate a fascination with life as it is lived outside of the imperial/ metropolitan centre of London. In the play’s specific interest in life in the “Celtic peripheries,” it has its clearest predecessor in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. In that play, Farquhar draws London audiences’ attentions not just to a place in the English provinces (the play is set in Shrewsbury) but also to the other “Celtic” nations belonging to the English crown; he does this by making Justice Balance a Welshman and by including several allusions to Welsh hills and mountains in the script. As we shall see, Griffith goes much farther than this in The School for Rakes. Griffith includes many very specific details regarding Wales and the Welsh throughout the script. Most notably, there is the inclusion of instances in which Welsh characters (most notably, Mrs. Winifred and Captain Loyd) express pride in their long Welsh ancestries.30 Mrs. Winifred is particularly proud of her “ap Evans” blood, which she claims is more ancient and noble than that of most English aristocrats and than that of her fellow Welsh person Loyd.31 Although, in a down moment, she acknowledges that the family has had its share of “ideots,” in the main her Welsh ancestry is a source of strength for her.32 For example, when she begins to suspect that the English noble Lord Eustace may have duped her and her niece Harriet Evans (Eustace had a sham wedding conducted between himself and Harriet in the hopes of “compromising” her), she says: “I am determin’d to know the truth, from him … ‘Tis impossible he should dare to deceive me—but if he has, he shall find that the Ap Evans’s are not to be injured, with impunity.”33 As it happens, Winifred was duped by Lord Eustace, and this is all part of Griffith’s attempt to cast a cold eye on English “Titles.” For, in the play, while Winifred is completely in awe of titles and royalty (“Persons, of a certain rank in life, are always worthy”), her brother the Welsh baronet Sir William Evans believes that titles and proximity to the English throne— whether hereditary or political—are no guarantee of good character.34 Their contrasting views are perhaps best expressed in the following

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exchange, which takes place after they realise that Lord Eustace’s marriage to Harriet, who is Sir William’s daughter, was indeed a sham: Mrs. Win. Pray, Sir William, … you know lord Eustace has a place, at court. Sir Wm. What then? Mrs. Win. I wou’d, at least, let the king know what a servant he has about him; and as I may reasonably suppose that his majesty may have heard of our [ap Evans] ancestors, tho’ he knows nothing of you, Sir William, I wou’d advise you to throw yourself, at his feet—He is himself a father. Sir Wm. Blest may he long be, in that honour’d title! Tho’ I am render’d wretched, by the name—But what can he do, for me? Mrs. Win. Disgrace, and displace the man, who has wrong’d you, altho’ he be a lord. Sir Wm. What is his title? has he not debas’d it—But know, there is no difference of rank, before the throne—degrees of elevation are only seen by those who look above them: kings must look down, and therefore see all equal; and in our monarch’s sight, the rights, even of the meanest subject, are precious as his own—But yet he cannot heal my wrongs. Mrs. Win. Tho’ I can never believe that a knight baronet is upon a par, with a lord, Sir William. Sir Wm. Absurd distinctions! I will hear no more[.]35

Sir William later makes his feelings regarding these matters perfectly clear to Lord Eustace himself: ‘Tis not your birth, young man, can varnish over vices, such as yours—Your rank renders them the more obnoxious. … You surely do not think I mean to give my daughter to you! What! to reward your vices, with a heart like hers—to have my child become, a second time, a sacrifice to that vain idol, Title!36

While Lord Eustace repents of having conducted the sham marriage and agrees to marry Harriet legitimately (with Harriet’s consent), Harriet has come around to her father’s view. When Winifred expresses bewilderment over Lord Eustace’s conduct, since he is “at least the ninth peer of his family, in a direct line,” Harriet responds: “Tho’ honours may be— honour is not hereditary, madam.”37 Sir William is not just used by Griffith to indicate the moral fallibility of British peers; she also uses him to be routinely critical of London. At one point, he makes the astute observations regarding the fact that the nation

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has allowed London to grow very large, to the detriment of other parts of the kingdom: When I was last in London, about twelve years ago, there was not a house, within a mile of it—but all the fools in the nation, have now crouded up to the capital, and made the head too large for the body; and this very place, where I used to send my horses to graze, begins now, to look something like a street.38

Griffith is depicting the true feelings of people from the Celtic Fringe for London audiences, who may be surprised to hear these negative remarks about the English capital or to witness healthy disrespect for peers of the realm from people who should supposedly be clearer about their own (lower) place in the social pecking order. Repeated allusions to British garrisons in Ireland also force those audiences to confront realities “on the ground” outside of England. Just as important from an Irish Studies point of view is Griffith’s depicting of the prejudice that people from the other nations under the English crown endure when they come to the “mother country.” Throughout the play, the English servant Willis makes rude remarks about the Welsh characters (including the baronet), even mocking the way they speak. He says of a conversation between Sir William and Winifred: [T]heir Welch [sic] bloods were up, and a fine splutter there was, between them; but, tho’ you might have heard them into Hyde-Park, they spoke so quick, that I cou’d only pick up an odd word, here and there[.]39

When inspecting the outside of a letter sent to Sir William, Willis remarks: To Sir William Evans, baronet; the post-mark, Monmouth; this, probably, comes from his steward, and may, possibly, contain an account of a strayed sheep, or a cur hanged.40

And Griffith makes clear that the baronet’s Welsh servants are being treated poorly by the staff in Lord Eustace’s house, after they arrive there for a stay. Although Sir William has not yet learned about the sham marriage, he already suspects that Lord Eustace is a “young, idle, rakish lord” and therefore says to his servant: “I desire, Robert, that you will

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have as little communication, as possible, with his lordship’s servants, and that you will prevent the rest of my family, from having any, also.”41 Robert tellingly responds: “Your honour need not fear.—They are not kindly to any of us.”42 Despite Griffith’s Irish “outsider” view of the English and her sympathy for “Celtic” peoples in the play, she still reveals the degree to which she has a hybrid Irish/British cultural inheritance. Most obviously, there are the respectful remarks made by Sir William about the king (cited above), demonstrating that Griffith’s belief in legislative independence for Ireland and an end to English misrule of Ireland did not preclude continued affiliation with the English crown. Like Jonathan Swift and William Molyneux, she was happy for Ireland to be a “sister kingdom” to England under the same crown. Likewise, the Welsh character of Captain Loyd makes two references to Empire in the play: one to Nabobs and the other to the attempted Welsh colony of Patagonia.43 In neither case do his remarks cast aspersions on British imperial projects. As such, Griffith reveals—as she would even more strongly in her next play—her complicity with Empire.

A Wife in the Right That next Griffith play, A Wife in the Right, was due to premiere at Covent Garden on 5 March 1772, but had to be postponed due to lead actor Ned Shuter being too drunk to perform. When the play was eventually mounted, Shuter still did not know his part properly, and the play therefore failed to hang together. There were also “provocations by the audience”; however, at this distance, it is hard to know if the rowdy audience members were offended by Shuter rendering the play less coherent on stage than it is in Griffith’s original script, or if (as with The Platonic Wife) they disliked the numerous lines calling for husbands to treat their wives better.44 Griffith’s friends were angry that what they considered a strong play did not get a fair hearing. As such, they encouraged her to publish the play by subscription, which she duly did. The list of subscribers is extremely impressive, featuring several giants of Irish and British political and cultural life, including James Boswell, Edmund Burke, Henry Flood, Charles Fox, David Garrick, Hercules Langrishe, Elizabeth Montagu, Joshua Reynolds, and two Irish playwrights: Isaac Bickerstaffe and Kitty Clive.45 One key way in which A Wife in the Right plugs into the Irish dramatic tradition is its featuring of “the potential duel between [the characters]

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Lord Seaton and Colonel Ramsey which recalls [Dublin playwright Sir Richard] Steele’s The Conscious Lovers.”46 Steele created his 1722 play “expressly to depict an averted duel,” in the hopes of discouraging men from duelling.47 Having such a moralistic purpose behind the writing of a play would have impressed Griffith, whose work often encourages people to reform their behaviour. Indeed, as we have seen, Griffith’s by turns satirical and didactic instinct often takes the form of critiquing English society, presumably in the hopes of reforming it. Such critiquing is one link between A Wife in the Right and the many plays critical of England which were written by Irish Anglican playwrights down through the centuries. In the case of this Griffith play, she uses a “Nabob”—Governor Ned Anderson, who has returned to England from a country he has grown to love, India—to express scorn for England’s materialism, its irrational dress, its tasteless food, its corrupt legal system, and the morals of its aristocracy.48 Griffith’s character goes so far as to suggest that the people of India are morally superior to those of England—and of Europe more generally. When asked to sign a bond, the Governor explains, “We have no bonds in India, and a man is unworthy to live in any quarter of the globe, whose word requires a counter-security.” The “Borough Jobber” Squeezem explains that “in Europe … ‘tis our certain maxim that any man’s money is as good as his bond, whatever his word may be.”49 The Governor says that he is very pleased that England has begun to appreciate Indian goods and even that it has adopted what another character calls “eastern … effeminacy” in its manners.50 Near the end of the play, Anderson expresses a desire to return to India, having tired of the corrupt political and financial schemes of the English people who surround him: [O]ne hears, every day, here, of such pranks as would taint the very air of India, and breed a pestilence there. I’ll go back, I’ll go back again, in the first ship that sails, and spend the remainder of my life among men whose words are bonds, and where the ties of honour require no laws to bind them—51

As if to emphasise the distinctly English nature of these societal sins, Griffith chooses a telling name for the primary orchestrator of the schemes against the Governor: Sam Bull, as in the caricature of England created by Scottish writer John Arbuthnot, “John Bull.” Over a century later, Irish Anglican playwright Bernard Shaw would, of course, invoke this same

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figure when writing a play deliberately intended to “shew the Englishman his own absurdities,” John Bull’s Other Island (1904).52 And, in 1948, Christine Longford (born in England to a half-Irish father and resident in Ireland for most of her adult life) included a Stage English character called Ferdinand Bull in what might be the greatest of the eighteen original plays she wrote for Dublin’s Gate Theatre, Tankardstown, or A Lot to be Thankful For. (Of course, this name references both John Bull and the timid cartoon character Ferdinand the Bull.) As for the Irish playwrights who came before Griffith, this use of a non-­ Irish outsider to express one’s Irish outsider view of the English is most clearly reminiscent of George Farquhar’s character Sir Harry Wildair from the plays The Constant Couple (1699) and Sir Harry Wildair (1701). The fact that Sir Harry was educated in France gives him a critical, outsider’s view of the English, and he is used—like Griffith’s Governor Anderson— as, effectively, a “surrogate Irish” character voicing the playwright’s own socio-political views. All of this aside, Griffith still reveals her British cultural inheritance and her Irish/British hybridity in the play. For one thing, she does not actually critique the way in which the Governor made his money while in India. Even though he loves that South Asian country, he still admits having had to “fight Gentoos, Marattoes, Seapoys, and climates” to attain his current position—and, presumably, his money.53 Griffith’s own son became rich working for the East India Company, and Elizabeth and her husband eventually retired back to Ireland, settling down in material comfort on their son’s estate in Co. Kildare. As such, her personal complicity with Empire was strong and not something she seemed particularly inclined to examine—be it in this play or (as noted) in her previous one, The School for Rakes. Griffith’s “Britishness” can also be seen in an exchange at the end of the play. Having witnessed the Governor’s generosity, Colonel Ramsay says, “I find you have brought over not only the wealth, but the humanity of the East Indians, along with you.” Lord Seaton replies, “His tastes and manners may be foreign, perhaps, Colonel, but his good-nature and generosity are true English staple. A Briton need never go a trafficking for principles.”54 This seems like the Welsh-born Irish Anglican Griffith’s attempt to affirm British virtues at the end of the play, in order to reassure London audiences and perhaps herself. However, this one line cannot efface an audience member’s or reader’s memory of all of the scathing remarks made about English society and politics throughout the play.

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The Times Griffith’s last play, The Times, was produced by her old acquaintance, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, at Drury Lane in 1779. It “pleased” audiences and ran for nine nights, and was published the following year.55 The script is based loosely on Venetian playwright Carlo Goldini’s French-language comedy Le bourru bienfaisant (1771), but Griffith “turned Goldini’s comedy of character into a satire of contemporary mores.”56 As critics have noted, the scene towards the end of the play in which Lady Mary Woodley’s guests “merrily go on playing [cards] and gossiping even while witnessing her profound distress … constitutes a harsh denunciation of a dissolute society.”57 And that society was, of course, Georgian England. As in Griffith’s previous plays—and as in the work of other English-based, Irish Anglican playwrights—she makes strong, forthright criticisms regarding the English through her characters’ words and actions. As I have noted elsewhere, there has been a long line of “two-faced” English characters created by English-based, Irish Anglican playwrights; these characters seemingly help Irish Anglican playwrights to affirm Wilde’s contention that England is “the native land of the hypocrite” and to suggest that hypocrisy is a peculiarly English vice.58 Examples that pre-­ date Griffith’s The Times include Vizard in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple, Colonel Mushroom in Charles Macklin’s The True-Born Irishman, young Marlow in Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, and Joseph Surface in R.B. Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777). As if acknowledging this tradition, Griffith has one character in the play explicitly allude to Sheridan’s The School for Scandal and names an unseen character “Lady Mushroom” after the Macklin character.59 In Griffith’s The Times, the English hypocrites are the Bromleys, who have pretended to be friends of Mr. and Lady Woodley, while also trying to swindle them. Mr. Bromley counsels Mrs. Bromley to pretend to act surprised when the bailiffs arrive at Lady Mary’s house. He suggests: “[I]t will be proper for you to faint, I think.” Mrs. Bromley coolly replies: “Never fear my acting properly.”60 Likewise, when Lady Mary discovers Mrs. Bromely’s scheming and realises that she was never a true friend, she says, “Was there ever so sudden and extraordinary a change in any human creature!” Her virtuous younger relation Louisa replies, “‘Tis rather a discovery, than a metamorphose, my dear Lady Mary!—I have long seen through Mrs. Bromley’s mask—‘twas only made of gauze.”61

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Of course, being a corrupt person herself gives Mrs. Bromley a keen eye for the corruption present in the society around her, and Griffith uses her to verbally expose many of London high society’s machinations and less-­ than-­admirable practices. From an Irish point of view, most noteworthy is how Griffith uses her to implicitly critique absentee landlords (even ones with English estates). Mrs. Bromley assures Lady Mary that “No creature stays at their family seats, now-a-days, unless it be some antiquated Dowager, who, like an old Gothic corner cupboard, remains fixed to the freehold.”62 The same subject also informs one of the exchanges in which Lord Woodley (another character repeatedly used by Griffith to score satirical points) voices strong criticisms of England’s aristocracy. He is in conversation with his lawyer and friend, Counsellor Belford: Belford. But if Mr. Woodley should be undone [i.e., financially ruined], what will become of your niece [Lady Mary]? Sir Will. Let her share his fate, as she has done his folly—she has earned it.—An extravagant woman, that could not be content to live at one of the finest Seats in England, but must frisk it to Spa and Paris, forsooth, like the rest of the silly English, to squander their money, and be laughed at by Foreigners!63

Later in the play, Sir William tells Belford that “there have been no men born [in England], at least, for these last thirty years—all monkies and macaronies. No Hearts of Oak, now, Belford,—all dwindled, dwindled into aspens!” Belford replies: Your sarcasm is rather too general, my good friend. Courage is the birth-­ right of an Englishman, and while one acre of our soil remains, both the Oak and the Laurel will thrive on it.64

As with Lord Seaton’s rather feeble defence of England and “Britons” at the end of A Wife in the Right, this counter-argument from Counsellor Belford in The Times is quite weak compared to the strength of the criticisms of English society included throughout the rest of the play.

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Conclusion As we have seen, Elizabeth Griffith deliberately indicated that she was part of the Irish Anglican dramatic tradition in her work by clearly alluding to her predecessors and contemporaries, including George Farquhar, Thomas Southerne, Sir Richard Steele, Thomas Sheridan, Charles Macklin, and Thomas Sheridan’s son Richard Brinsley Sheridan. However, she also included tropes from their work—and that of other earlier Irish Anglican playwrights, such as Mary Davys—with an eye towards expanding on or tweaking them to suit her own dramaturgical needs and socio-political preoccupations. As we have also seen, Griffith shared key socio-political concerns with important Irish Anglican playwrights who emerged alongside or after her—including the aforementioned R.B. Sheridan, but also Sheridan’s mother Frances, Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde, and Bernard Shaw. These writers employed similar methods to Griffith when satirising the English or covertly advertising their own Irishness to Irish audience members and readers. Griffith deserves to be more widely acknowledged in histories of Irish theatre. It is true that her work has rarely (if ever) been revived in her native Ireland after her lifetime, but she was a vital Irish presence in London at a time when Ireland was contributing much popular and important work to the English stage. Indeed, the high calibre of Griffith’s scripts means that she is worthy of standing alongside important, contemporary compatriots like Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and that she should arguably be remembered ahead of the other Irish playwrights of her time whose work has been more frequently celebrated and revived, such as Arthur Murphy, Hugh Kelly, Charles Macklin, Frances Sheridan, Isaac Bickerstaffe, and John O’Keeffe. The next time Irish theatremakers are tempted to put on a work by one of these eighteenth-century Irish figures, they would be well-advised to consider reviving a strong Griffith play like The Platonic Wife or The School for Rakes instead—especially since Irish theatres and theatre companies have been expressing a strong desire to put on more work by women in the aftermath of the #WakingTheFeminists (WTF) controversy of 2015–2016.65

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Notes 1. Kiberd, Irish Writer and the World, 23. For other prominent examples of this, see Roche, Irish Dramatic Revival, 12, 15; Grene, Politics of Irish Drama, 1; Deane, Short History of Irish Literature, 9; Mercier, Irish Comic Tradition, 79; Mac Liammóir, Theatre in Ireland, 7. 2. See, for example, Ward, “Caught in a Contract”; Heard, Experimentation on the English Stage; Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins; Clare, “Goldsmith, the Gate, and the Hibernicising of Anglo-Irish Plays”; O’Toole, Traitor’s Kiss; Killeen, Faiths of Oscar Wilde; Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook. 3. Griffith’s other plays, besides the five covered in this chapter, include the closet dramas Theodorick, King of Denmark (1752) and Amana: A Dramatic Poem (1764); her translation of Diderot’s Dorval; or, the Test of Virtue (1767); and her adaptation of Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville; or, The Useless Precaution (1776). It should be noted that some critics have cast doubt over her authorship of the anonymously published her authorship of the anonymously published Theodorick and Dorval. 4. Griffith’s fictional works include the novels The Delicate Distress (1769), The History of Lady Barton (1771), and The Story of Lady Juliana Harley (1776), as well as fourteen of the short stories included in the multiauthored volume Novellettes (1780). Her non-fiction works include an influential critical study entitled The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated (1775) and Essays, Addressed to Young Married Women (1782). Griffith also translated several French works into English between 1761 and 1788 and edited the popular, multi-volume anthology A Collection of Novels (1777). 5. Rizzo, “‘Depressa Resurgam’,” 127. 6. The six-night run meant that Griffith made a fair amount of money from the play, since she benefitted from two “author benefit nights.” As Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy explain: “The repertory system [used in the eighteenth century] involved author benefit nights on the third, sixth, and ninth performance of a successful run, whereby the box office receipts less the costs of the house would go directly to the author, which meant that writing for the theatre could prove very rewarding indeed.” (Griffin and O’Shaughnessy, Introduction to The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, liv.) Rizzo estimates that, “depending on the value and number of the benefit tickets” sold, Griffith might have earned as much as “£300” from The Platonic Wife’s two benefit nights plus “£100” from the sale of the script’s copyright to her publishers. (Rizzo, “‘Depressa Resurgam’,” 128.) 7. Clare, “Why Did George Farquhar’s Work Turn Sectarian After The Constant Couple?” 160. 8. Griffith, Platonic Wife, 96.

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9. Ó Gallchoir, “Irish Wit on the London Stage,” Chapter Three. It should be noted that Ó Gallchoir and David O’Shaughnessy have both discussed Patrick’s expanded and even more heroic role in the draft originally submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, England’s theatrical censor. (See Ó Gallchoir, “Irish Wit on the London Stage”; O’Shaughnessy, “The Platonic Wife (1765) LA 244.”) 10. Mann et al., Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 116. 11. Rizzo, “‘Depressa Resurgam’,” 129. For similar views from other critics, see Mann et al., Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 117. 12. Rizzo, “‘Depressa Resurgam’,” 129. For the limited nature of the proto-­ feminism in The Platonic Wife, see Ó Gallchoir. “Irish Wit on the London Stage.” 13. Griffith, Double Mistake, 56. For “Biddy” as an anti-Irish slur, see McCabe, “Paddywhacking and Mick-taking: Of Being on First-name Terms with the Irish Other,” Endnote 2; Murphy, “Bridget and Biddy.” 14. Griffith, Double Mistake, 10. 15. Ibid., 11. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 12. 18. At one point, Lord Somerville angrily implies that the Belmonts are not “properly” British (in comparison with himself). However, he focuses on the French origin of their surname in his insults. (Ibid., 35.) 19. Ibid., 24, 25, 50, 61. 20. Griffith, School for Rakes, 5; Griffith, Wife in the Right, 27; Griffith, The Times, 64. 21. See Clare, “Goldsmith, the Gate, and the Hibernicising of Anglo-Irish Plays,” 239–259; Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 34–36, 93–94. 22. Griffith, Double Mistake, 14. 23. Douglas and Ross, Introduction and Notes to The Triumph of Prudence over Passion, 26. 24. Ibid., 191–192. 25. Griffith, School for Rakes, Advertisement. Italics in original. 26. Corporaal, “‘There’s no Place like old England’,” Chapter One. 27. Frances Sheridan’s A Trip to Bath was famously (and unjustly) rejected by David Garrick at Drury Lane; as such, what survives of the manuscript was not published until 1902 and therefore would have been unknown to Griffith and many of the other playwrights listed here. 28. Like Eton Montem, Edgeworth’s 1786 home theatrical The Double Disguise is set in a country inn in England. However, that (fascinating) play was not published until 2014, and therefore cannot be said to have influenced the ongoing Irish Anglican dramatic tradition.

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29. One might also list Clotilde Graves’s A Mother of Three (1896); however, it must be noted that Graves, raised Anglican, converted to Catholicism around the time of the play’s premiere. 30. Griffith, School for Rakes, 4, 36, 60, 76, 81. 31. Ibid., 36, 81. 32. Ibid., 68. 33. Ibid., 60. 34. Ibid., 28. 35. Ibid., 66. 36. Ibid., 74. 37. Ibid., 59. 38. Ibid., 5. 39. Ibid., 1–2. 40. Ibid., 42. For Willis’s other anti-Welsh remarks, see Ibid., 41, 55. 41. Ibid., 5; 30. 42. Ibid., 30. 43. Ibid., 38, 61. 44. Mann et al., Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 357. 45. It is possible that the actor and playwright Clive was born in London. However, her father was a celebrated Irishman (William Raftor) who served in the army of Louis XIV and was lawyer to James II, and she always placed great emphasis on her Irish background. 46. Mann et al., Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 357. 47. Leigh, Touché, 47. It should be noted that Griffith also features Steele-­ esque “averted duels” in The Double Mistake and The School for Rakes. 48. Griffith, Wife in the Right, 13, 15–16, 22, 47, 66–67. 49. Ibid., 22. 50. Ibid., 13. 51. Ibid., 66–67. 52. As quoted in Holroyd, Bernard Shaw Volume 2, 81. This quote comes from the “Author’s Instructions to the Producer.” It should be noted that Shaw spelled certain words in his own idiosyncratic way: for example, he always spelled show as “shew,” as is evident from this quote. 53. Griffith, Wife in the Right, 87. 54. Ibid., 88. 55. Rizzo, “‘Depressa Resurgam’,” 138. 56. Mann et al., Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 327. 57. Ibid. 58. Clare, “Goldsmith, the Gate, and the Hibernicising of Anglo-Irish Plays,” 252–253; Wilde, Complete Works, 118.

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59. Griffith, The Times, 4, 6. Macklin’s Colonel Mushroom (an epicurean) may also have informed the creation of another unseen character in Griffith’s play: Sir Harry Granger. It should be noted that there is one other open allusion to the Irish dramatic tradition in the play: the Yorkshire-born but Kilkenny- and Dublin-­educated William Congreve is namechecked in the play’s Prologue. (Ibid., vii.) 60. Ibid., 59. Emphasis mine. 61. Ibid., 73. 62. Ibid., 47. 63. Ibid., 24. 64. Ibid., 33. Emphasis in original. 65. In late 2015, the Abbey Theatre announced its “Waking the Nation” programme, which would mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. Only one of the ten plays being produced was by a woman (Me Mollser, by Ali White); this was a short companion piece to the mainstage production of Seán O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars (1926) and was to be produced primarily in schools. A grassroots movement called #WakingTheFeminists (WTF) emerged, and this organisation would do much over the ensuing years to highlight gender inequality in the Irish theatre sector. See, for example, the vitally important report they put together: Donohue et al., Gender Counts.

References Clare, David. “Goldsmith, the Gate, and the Hibernicising of Anglo-Irish Plays.” In The Gate Theatre, Dublin: Inspiration and Craft. Eds. David Clare, Des Lally, and Patrick Lonergan. Dublin: Carysfort / Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018. 239–259. Print. Clare, David. “Why Did George Farquhar’s Work Turn Sectarian After The Constant Couple?” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 103.410 (2014): 159–168. 160. Print. Corporaal, Marguérite. “‘There’s no Place like old England’: Space and Identity in Mary Davys’s The Northern Heiress. or the Humours of York (1716).” In The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716–2016) – Volume 1 (1716–1992). Eds. David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2021. Chapter One [forthcoming]. In Press. Deane, Seamus. A Short History of Irish Literature. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. Print. Donohue, Brenda, Tanya Dean, Ciara O’Dowd, Ciara Murphy, Kathleen Cawley, and Kate Harris. Gender Counts: An Analysis of Gender in Irish Theatre, 2006–2015. Dublin: Waking the Feminists / The Arts Council, 2017. Print.

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Douglas, Aileen, and Ian Campbell Ross. Introduction and Notes to The Triumph of Prudence over Passion, by Elizabeth Sheridan. Dublin: Four Courts, 2011. Print. Grene, Nicholas. The Politics of Irish Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print. Griffin, Michael. Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2013. Print. Griffin, Michael, and David O’Shaughnessy. Introduction to The Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, by Oliver Goldsmith. Eds. Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. xv–lxii. Print. Griffith, Elizabeth. The Double Mistake. London: Almon et al., 1768. 57. Print. Griffith, Elizabeth. The Platonic Wife. London: Johnston et al., 1765. Print. Griffith, Elizabeth. The School for Rakes. London: Becket / De Hondt, 1769. Print. Griffith, Elizabeth. The Times. London: Fielding & Walker et al., 1780. Print. Griffith, Elizabeth. A Wife in the Right. London: The Author / Dilly et  al., 1772. Print. Heard, Elisabeth J. Experimentation on the English Stage, 1695–1708: The Career of George Farquhar. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Print. Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw Volume 2 (1898–1918): The Pursuit of Power. New York: Vintage, 1991. Print. Kiberd, Declan. The Irish Writer and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print. Killeen, Jarlath. The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Leigh, John. Touché: The Duel in Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2015. Print. Mac Liammóir, Micheál. Theatre in Ireland. Dublin: Three Candles, 1950. Print. Mann, David D., and Susan Garland Mann, with Camille Garnier. Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1660–1823. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print. McCabe, James. “Paddywhacking and Mick-taking: Of Being on First-name Terms with the Irish Other.” L’autre. Eds. Janine Dove-Rumé, Michel Naumann, and Tri Tran. Tours: Presses universitaires François-Rabelais, 2008. 387–406. Print. Mercier, Vivien. The Irish Comic Tradition. London: Souvenir, 1991. Print. Murphy, Maureen. “Bridget and Biddy: Images of the Irish Servant Girl in Puck Cartoons, 1880–1890.” In New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora. Ed. Charles Fanning. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. 152–175. Print. Ó Gallchoir, Clíona. “Irish Wit on the London Stage: Elizabeth Griffith’s The Platonic Wife.” In The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716–2016) – Volume 1 (1716–1992). Eds. David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2021. Chapter Three [forthcoming]. In Press.

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O’Shaughnessy, David. “The Platonic Wife (1765) LA 244.” tobeomitted.tcd.ie. The Censorship of British Theatre, 1737–1843 Online Database, n.d. Web. 13 December 2019. O’Toole, Fintan. A Traitor’s Kiss: A Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998. Print. Rizzo, Betty. “‘Depressa Resurgam’: Elizabeth Griffith’s Playwriting Career.” In Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820. Eds. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski. Athens: Ohio UP, 1991. 120–142. Print. Roche, Anthony. The Irish Dramatic Revival 1899–1939. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Print. Ward, James. “Caught in a Contract: Congreve, Farquhar and Contractarian Masculinities.” In Ireland and Masculinities in History: Genders and Sexualities in History. Eds. Rebecca Anne Barr, Sean Brady, and Jane McGaughey. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 19–38. Print. Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New  York: Barnes & Noble, 1994. Print.

CHAPTER 3

The Portraits of the English in the Work of Dion Boucicault, Bram Stoker, and Erskine Childers

Abstract  How real were the anti-English satirical intentions of the Irish Anglican writers who lived in England and wrote primarily for English audiences and readerships? While it is now clear—thanks to the work of various recent critics—that key figures from Jonathan Swift through to William Trevor were passing subversive, satirical comment on the English, there are other English-based Irish Anglican writers whose credentials as cultural critics of the English require more piercing scrutiny. While Dion Boucicault always played the role of the Irish rebel in his life and work, deeper analysis of his Irish melodramas reveals that he ultimately flattered the English audience members who came to see his plays. The fiction of Bram Stoker and the classic 1903 novel by Erskine Childers—The Riddle of the Sands—seem similarly lacking in anti-English satirical intentions, despite Stoker’s support for Home Rule and Childers’s eventual conversion to uncompromising Irish Republicanism. Keywords  Dion Boucicault • Bram Stoker • Erskine Childers • Melodrama • Dracula

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Clare, Irish Anglican Literature and Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68353-5_3

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In an essay from 1909, James Joyce criticised the distinguished line of English-based, Irish Anglican playwrights discussed in the last chapter for playing the role of “court jester to the English.”1 Irish Catholic contemporaries of Joyce went a step further and suggested that most of the celebrated Irish Anglican writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries belonged to the English and not the Irish literary canon: Patrick Pearse described Yeats as a “minor English poet”2 and Daniel Corkery stated that he hated referring to writers like Swift, Goldsmith, and Shaw as Irish “expatriates” because they were “writers for whom Ireland was never a patria in any sense.”3 Corkery believed that, of all the celebrated Irish Protestant writers, only Synge was worthy of inclusion in the Irish literary canon.4 Since the 1980s, however, that pendulum has swung, and many Irish Studies critics (especially those with an interest in postcolonial theory) have contended that celebrated, English-based, Irish Anglican writers actually possessed a subversive, pro-Irish, anti-­ English agenda when depicting the English and when handling socio-­ political concerns in their work.5 It is certainly true that—as this book attempts to show—the work of many important Irish Anglican writers was more Irish than is usually credited and that a degree of “anti-Englishness” (to quote Elizabeth Bowen) permeates much Irish Anglican writing.6 But how real were the anti-English satirical intentions of the Irish Anglican dramatists and fiction writers who lived in England, wrote primarily for English audiences and readerships, and—in many cases—regarded themselves as British (or even English) as well as Irish? It is now relatively easy to see—thanks to the work of several recent critics—that figures such as Goldsmith, Griffith, R.B. Sheridan, Wilde, Shaw, Bowen, and Trevor (and even some writers who were unerringly loyal to the English crown, such as Farquhar and Swift) were definitely passing subversive, satirical comment on the English.7 However, there are other English-based Irish Anglican writers whose credentials as cultural critics of the English require more piercing scrutiny than they have arguably received to date. As will become clear, while the (occasionally English-based) Victorian melodrama specialist Dion Boucicault frequently played the role of the Irish rebel in his life and work, deeper analysis of his Irish melodramas reveals that he ultimately flattered the English audience members who came to see his plays. A tendency to flatter is also present in the work of the legendary author of Dracula (1897), the Dubliner Abraham “Bram” Stoker—even in his Irish novel The Snake’s Pass (1890). And the classic 1903 novel by Erskine Childers—The Riddle of the Sands—seems similarly

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lacking in anti-English satirical intentions: this is quite curious, given that Childers would eventually support the armed fight for Irish freedom (and would be executed for his role on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War). The contrast between the treatment of the English in that novel and Childers’s later fervent, anti-English political views reveals how far he travelled in his thinking during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Dion Boucicault Dion Boucicault was born Dionysius Lardner Boursiquot in Dublin in 1820. His nominal father was—as his surname indicates—from a Huguenot family, but his biological father was probably Dionysius Lardner, a lodger at the house of his mother, Anne Darley of the distinguished Dublin Darleys. Boucicault was educated in London from the age of thirteen, and became a professional actor in his late teens and, almost from the beginning of his theatrical career, he tried writing his own plays. Ultimately, Boucicault wrote or adapted over 150 plays during a career which saw him spend extended periods in England, Ireland, the United States, and Australia. As the author of tremendously successful (and enduring) Irish-themed melodramas, such as The Colleen Bawn (1860), Arrah-na-Pogue (1864), and The Shaughraun (1874), Boucicault loved to promote himself as an Irish rebel. He went so far as to (falsely) suggest that the London premiere of Arrah-na-Pogue coincided with the bombing of Clerkenwell Prison by the Fenians, and that “The Wearing of the Green” (his re-write of the eighteenth-century Irish rebel ballad “Green Upon the Cape”), which is featured in that same play, was banned by the British authorities.8 A closer inspection of Boucicault’s work, however, reveals that—ultimately—he refrains from passing satirical judgement on the English through his portrayals of English characters; indeed, he even makes these portraits deliberately flattering to the English. As Elizabeth Butler Cullingford and Richard Allen Cave have pointed out, Boucicault’s “non-confrontational dramaturgy and appeal to sentimentality,” written with the English box office in mind, led him to be “careful” in his “representation of … Englishmen,” always making sure to “avoid … giving direct political offense.”9 Cullingford has accurately described Boucicault’s English characters as being shaped by “the pressure of generic conventions, the fear of censorship, and his need to please London audiences.”10 Boucicault also seems to have taken care to ensure that English audiences would be

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reassured by his depictions of Irish characters, which frequently rely on age-­old, negative stereotypes. The portrayals of the English and the Irish in Arrah-na-Pogue (the only one of Boucicault’s major Irish melodramas to premiere in the United Kingdom before it played New York)11 ably demonstrates that, even though he was a truly gifted entertainer and—it must be stressed—a supremely important influence on Synge, Shaw, and O’Casey, he was ultimately more of a “court jester” to the English than a true rebel determined to aggressively critique England’s socio-political misdeeds. In Arrah-na-Pogue, the English characters—Major Coffin and the Secretary at Dublin Castle—merely do their duty in attempting to apprehend the Irish rebel who robbed the process-server Feeney and who has been stirring up sedition in the Wicklow hills. The Major may be humourless in the discharging of his duties, and the Secretary may express frank bewilderment at the ways of the Irish (“Shall I ever be able to understand this extraordinary people?”); however, Boucicault refrains from making these Englishmen wantonly cold or cruel to the Irish rebels.12 This is not because it is clear to these Englishmen that the Irish characters are innocent, unjustly assumed by others to be rebels due to their Irish Catholic backgrounds; these Irish characters actually are proud rebels, who happily boast that they would give succour to those who set themselves up against the crown. Boucicault’s unwillingness to offend English sensibilities leads him to have the normally legalistic Coffin and Secretary disregard or relax some of the court and prison rules, in deference to the mental anguish being suffered by the accused and their loved ones. This leniency is bewildering and frankly unbelievable, since these Irish characters are actively involved in undermining British authority in Ireland. During the course of the play, the nearest that Boucicault comes to passing biting, satirical comment on the English is when O’Grady says of Major Coffin: There goes a fine-hearted gentleman, who would cut more throats on principle and firm conviction than another blackguard would sacrifice to the worst passions of his nature.13

Boucicault then undermines such a damning anti-English statement by having O’Grady go on to say, with Stage Irish amorality, “If there be one thing that misleads a man more than another thing, it is having a firm conviction about anything.”14

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There are numerous other occasions in the script in which Boucicault exploits, without seriously interrogating, the Stage Irish tradition. For example, the Irish characters are not only hard-drinking but even advise giving whiskey to a horse to help it run faster. And we are repeatedly asked to laugh at their verbal bulls and their stupidity. Notably, the Irish “peasant” characters, and even the Irish Sergeant, are ignorant of legal terms like “alibi,” “plea,” and “deposition” (which Feeney refers to as an “imposition”).15 Their lack of nous in these scenes is significantly more profound than that of the “peasants” in the work of, for example, Maria Edgeworth or Somerville & Ross, in which it is strongly implied that the Irish Catholic tenantry are much smarter than they are letting on and that, as a rising people, they are tellingly well-acquainted with legal terms. Finally, the Irish in Arragh-na-Pogue are depicted as lawless, with no moral centre, ever ready to perjure themselves in court or to lie to cover sedition and theft. It is little wonder that Shaw believed that Boucicault was responsible for perpetuating rather than correcting popular negative stereotypes of the Irish, and that his plays struck Stewart Parker as being the product of (in the words of one of his characters) a “colonial soul.”16 While this may seem harsh, even Boucicault’s most overtly political work, The O’Dowd (1880)—written in sympathy with the Land League at the height of its campaigning—refrains from thoroughly alienating the London audiences for whom it was created. After all, as Deirdre McFeely notes, despite the fiery rhetoric of the Land Leaguers in the play, “violence never actually breaks out”; what’s more, the Land Leaguer played by Boucicault himself, Dennis O’Dowd, “ultimately enforces peace when the [crown-affiliated] police are unable to do so, and … offers protection to the [English] debt collectors” who are under threat from the Irish locals.17 Boucicault even decided to withdraw the play when it became clear how distasteful London audiences found the play’s politics. His decision to close the show rather than remove offensive portions from the script can be seen as a Nationalist act, as McFeely has argued.18 However, the announcement of the show’s closure (presumably composed by Boucicault himself) states that the playwright “has no wish to offend anyone” and that “rather than lose the favour of any of his audience, he will amend his error” in writing and producing the script “by withdrawing the play altogether.”19 In a subsequent interview in the New York Herald, Boucicault confessed that “it may have been questionable taste to thrust the matter at such a moment [i.e. the height of Land League agitation] before the English public.”20

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Bram Stoker The Dublin-born Bram Stoker is another author whose agenda with regard to his portrayal of the English requires additional scrutiny. As a survey of his fiction reveals, Stoker (despite the fact that he was a proud Irishman who did not leave Dublin for London until he was thirty-one) seems to have had no anti-English satirical intentions in his work. While critics such as Terry Eagleton, R.F. Foster, Declan Kiberd, and Gregory Castle persuasively demonstrate that many of the socio-political anxieties peculiar to the Irish Anglican Ascendancy find their way into Stoker’s perennially popular novel, Dracula (1897), that does not mean that the portrait of the English in the novel is in any way subversive.21 Indeed, as the analysis by the aforementioned critics suggests, Stoker’s inclusion of Irish Anglican preoccupations in the novel was effectively subconscious. Likewise, Brian Earls has demonstrated that, while Stoker’s interest in Irish folklore may have influenced his Irish novel The Snake’s Pass (1890) to a degree, attempts to prove that he deliberately included allusions to obscure Irish legends (some drawn from Irish-language sources) in Dracula are ultimately unconvincing.22 (That said, creepy stories told to Stoker by his Sligo mother when he was bedbound during a childhood plagued by illness undoubtedly helped to form the author’s later sensibilities.) Given the subterranean nature of Dracula’s Irishness, it is therefore unsurprising that the novel’s English characters (Jonathan Harker, Mina Harker, Lucy Westenra, Dr. John Seward, and Lord Godalming) all come across as Stoker’s straightforward—that is, non-satirical—attempts at creating believable English people, just as Van Helsing is his attempt at a convincing Dutchman and Quincey Morris his vision of a Texan. This lack of subversive intent in Dracula and, indeed, his other English-set works is just what we should expect, given that Stoker was a populist writer of Gothic potboilers for a primarily English readership. However, it is especially noteworthy that even in The Snake’s Pass (Stoker’s only Irish novel), he elects not to turn his English narrator, Arthur Severn, into a Stage Englishman. Indeed, despite the fact that Severn is an uptight Englishman without any knowledge of Ireland, who is newly settled in Connemara but who has an eye towards “improving” the place, Stoker’s depiction of him is never cruel.23 That is to say, Severn is never castigated or mocked for his lack of knowledge of Irish ways or his presumption in wanting to “improve” the

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country—as Stage Englishmen in Irish literature so often are. In fact, with his readership firmly in mind, Stoker flatters the English through his portraits of Severn and his English friend, Dick Sutherland. Their English work ethic and optimism (not to mention, money), as well as Dick’s modern scientific knowledge regarding how to reclaim bog, mean that Knockcalltecrore will eventually be “transform[ed] into a fairyland.”24 The area’s kind inhabitants will be one of its distinguishing features, thanks to the fact that all of the “good” local Irish people survive and all of the “bad” Irish people are swallowed up when the town’s monster-like bog does its worst towards the end of the novel. (As a theatrical manager, Stoker was obviously very familiar with the trappings of nineteenth-­ century melodrama.) Of course, simply because Stoker does not have subversive satirical intentions regarding the English in the novel, that does not mean that he avoids exploiting old stereotypes of the warm-hearted, “natural” Irish and the cold, emotionally repressed English in the work. However, even here we see evidence of his flattery of the English and of his focus being primarily upon them: from the very beginning of the novel, the Irish landscape and characters are effectively there to help Severn loosen up and become warmer interpersonally. (This recalls the way that, as Toni Morrison and Robert Gooding-Williams have shown in their work on racial and ethnic representation, black and native American characters are often used to facilitate an internal transformation in the lead white character in Hollywood films and American literature.)25 In the case of The Snake’s Pass, the “wild natural beauty” of the West of Ireland, the colourful locals with allegedly natural manners and an intuitive sense regarding weather and animals, and a soulful colleen named Norah, all help awaken Severn to “the beauty and reality of the world.”26 This liberates him from the “rigid severity” of his English upbringing at the hands of the “sternly uncompromising” old aunt who raised him.27 The decision to avoid anti-English satire is one that Irish authors writing for overwhelmingly English audiences and readerships are certainly free to take, and many have. Stoker, in electing to avoid passing satirical comment on the English through his portrayals of them, clearly chose to join Boucicault in courting rather than challenging English audience members/readers in the way that English-based, Irish Anglican writers did so frequently between the premiere of George Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle (1698) and the publication of classic, English-set works by more recent writers such as William Trevor and Leland Bardwell.28

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Erskine Childers Erskine Childers was born in London to an Irish Anglican mother and an English father. When he was six, his father died of tuberculosis and his mother was sent to a home for incurables (she had caught the disease from her husband). Childers and his siblings were sent to Glendalough, Co. Wicklow to be raised by their uncle and aunt, Charles and Agnes (Childers) Barton. Young Erskine fell in love with Glendalough, and it provided solace at a time of great turmoil in his life. After four years of living there full time, Childers was sent to board at Haileybury College, an English public school, but Glendalough remained the home that he returned to for all of his school holidays and that he cherished deeply throughout his life. In the words of his wife, Childers “loved [Glendalough] passionately,” and this love helped fire his eventual decision to dedicate his life to Ireland.29 In 1914, he ran guns to the Irish Volunteers in response to the threat posed to Home Rule by armed Ulster Unionists (these guns were later used in the Easter Rising); he served in the first and second Dáil; he wrote fiery tracts condemning British rule in Ireland; and he was executed by the Free State for having served on the Republican side in the Irish Civil War. Alluding, no doubt, to Childers’s public school accent, his “English-made reputation,” and a manner that Frank O’Connor described as “peculiarly English,” Arthur Griffith angrily called Childers a “damned Englishman” during a Dáil debate (disregarding Childers’s truthful defence that his constituents in Wicklow “have known me since my boyhood days”).30 Childers’s one work of fiction, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), was written while he was working as a clerk in the House of Commons in London— that is, prior to his conversion to Irish Republicanism. However, it is more influenced by his Irish Anglican background than many might realise. Consider the fact that Childers would have felt pressure to tone down his Irishness when at an English public school and Cambridge, and likewise to downplay his perceived Englishness when at home in Ireland. A life plagued by identity politics inspired a novel in which, as David Trotter has pointed out, “identity is a continual performance.”31 The German invasion plot in the novel is being overseen by an English traitor (alias Dollmann), who is passing himself off as a German. In order to foil the invasion, the Englishmen Carruthers and Davies have to occasionally pretend to be innocent English tourists, yachting for sport around the Frisian Islands, and they occasionally disguise themselves as German sailors to avoid arousing suspicion as they sail into dangerous waters. The biggest

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role they assume is in genuinely trying to be ad-hoc English field spies, engaging in activities that are new to them but that circumstances have demanded they take up. Another aspect of the novel influenced by Childers’s relationship with Ireland is his fascination with the psychology of the man who has betrayed England, as expressed through his characters Carruthers and Davies. These characters struggle hard to guess what “motive”—what “malignant perfidy and base passion”—could have driven “an Englishman, bearing an honoured name” to become a traitor, which the Englishmen believe is “the vilest creature on God’s earth.”32 It is as though Childers himself is trying to understand what would drive a man to betray the British Empire, because there is a secret part of himself that desires to do the same, on behalf of Ireland. In light of these Irish influences, it would be tempting to suggest that there is deliberate, satirical intent behind the over-the-top Englishness of Carruthers and Davies, with their constant “Hang it all!”s, “I say!”s and “By Jove!”s, but that is unlikely for two reasons. First, when Childers wrote The Riddle of the Sands, he still “conformed instinctively to [his] family’s Unionist line.”33 It would take the influence of his “anti-­ Imperialist” American wife, Molly (née Osgood), and the renewed struggle for Home Rule between 1908 and 1914, to wake him up fully to the Irish separatist cause.34 Even then, he initially supported Home Rule— that is, Ireland having “dominion” status within the British Empire, such as that enjoyed by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—as opposed to complete independence. In fact, just after securing guns for the Irish Volunteers in 1914, Childers joined the Allied effort in the Great War and served with distinction in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and the British Admiralty between 1914 and 1917. The fact that he saw “no incompatibility between serving in British naval intelligence and advocating all-Ireland Home Rule” was a clear sign of his Irish/British hybridity as an Irish Anglican.35 Childers’s subsequent conversion from “hybridity” to full-blown “discord” is arguably traceable to his participation in the Dublin-based Irish Convention of 1917–1918. The Convention was convened by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and sought to resolve questions around how Home Rule might be implemented. Irish patriots involved in the Convention were bitterly disappointed when Lloyd George not only ignored many of their key recommendations but also, in April 1918, tied the implementation of Home Rule to the introduction of conscription in

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Ireland. In reaction to this, Childers stated: “in trying to coerce Ireland even at the moment when it is offering Home Rule,” “the English government is characteristically pursuing an insane and criminal course”36—his Irish Anglican “anti-Englishness” coming more thoroughly to the fore. Childers returned to London after the Convention to serve in the newly formed Royal Air Force, but he was very ripe for conversion to militant Republicanism. After meeting Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera in the spring of 1919, Childers concluded that “dominion” status was not sufficient, and that Ireland needed to completely break the tie with the United Kingdom. Another reason why the portraits of the English in The Riddle of the Sands are unlikely to be satirical is that commercial considerations were very important to Childers when he wrote the book. He desired readers and intended for the novel to be entertaining to the many, not merely the few. At a relatively late stage, he added “the romantic interest [Davies’s infatuation with Clara Dollman] in deference to his sister,” and, presumably, to enhance the book’s chance for popularity.37 With such motivations driving the creation of the book, it is clear that critiquing the English was not a major concern during the writing process. Indeed, given that he sought a big English readership, Childers would have been singularly reluctant to reflect negatively on members of his target audience.

Conclusion Because critics have helped us to see the many ways in which English-­ based, Irish Anglican writers from Farquhar to Trevor subtly—and sometimes not-so-subtly—critique the English in their work, one commonly sees analysis that implies that all intelligent, canny writers from Church of Ireland backgrounds who lived in England cast an Irish outsider’s eye on the English with a view towards scoring satirical points off of the imperial centre (or former imperial centre for writers from the twenty-six counties post-independence). In assessing certain “problem cases,” however, it becomes clear that Boucicault, Stoker, and Childers elected not to do this in their drama and fiction. They wrote with commercial considerations in mind and therefore had no intention of alienating their primarily English readerships and theatre audiences. That said, this chapter is not intended as a Corkery-esque judgement against these writers, excluding them from the Irish canon for having neglected their “duty” to Ireland. I am merely demonstrating that, while

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the view that these writers had of the English was undoubtedly affected by their Irish outsider perspectives, that does not automatically mean that their portraits of the English were deliberate, subversive, satirical attacks against England on behalf of dear, old Ireland—something that critics working in the wake of the 1980s postcolonial “turn” in Irish Studies might be tempted to believe and to contend. The flattering portraits of the English in these works and the desire for English popularity are obvious manifestations of the Irish/British hybridity of these Irish Anglican writers. However, that is not the whole story. Moving away from their literary work and focussing instead on their personal convictions, it is clear that Boucicault’s generous support for Fenian prisoners, Stoker’s firm belief in Irish Home Rule, and Childers’s eventual conversion to militant Republicanism are also evidence of the “anti-Englishness” to which Irish Anglicans are often prone.38

Notes 1. Joyce, “Oscar Wilde,” 149. 2. Pearse, Letters, 9. 3. Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, 3. 4. Ibid., 1–27, 233–243. 5. Obvious examples of this tendency among postcolonial critics include the reflections on major, English-based, Irish Anglican writers in Kearney, Irish Mind; Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger; McLoughlin, Contesting Ireland; Kiberd, Irish Classics; Davis, Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender. 6. Bowen, “The Idea of France,” 63. 7. For examples of studies demonstrating that each of these writers cast an Irish outsider’s eye on the English, see the chapter on Elizabeth Griffith in this book, plus: Mahony, Jonathan Swift; Roberts, George Farquhar; Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins; O’Toole, Traitor’s Kiss; Killeen, Faiths of Oscar Wilde; Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook; Corcoran, Elizabeth Bowen; FitzGerald-Hoyt, William Trevor. 8. McFeely, Dion Boucicault, 49. 9. Cullingford, Ireland’s Others, 18. She is summarising, and agreeing with, the view put forward in Cave, “Staging the Irishman.” 10. Cullingford, Ireland’s Others, 14. 11. Arrah-na-Pogue was meant to premiere in Manchester but instead debuted in Dublin (at the time, still part of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”) on 7 November 1864. This production, which starred Boucicault in the role of Shaun the Post, transferred to London in March

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of the following year. The script was significantly altered for the London run (for example, the rebel song “The Wearing of the Green” was added), and the London script is now considered the definitive version of the play. As Deirdre McFeely shows, Boucicault seems to have wanted to make the play more nationalistic when bringing it to London audiences, but—based on reviews—“there is no evidence that either the song [“The Wearing of the Green”] or the play was being openly used or received in a political manner.” (McFeely, Dion Boucicault, 49.) This was obviously due to the play’s ultimately flattering portraits of the English characters and its unthreatening Stage Irishness, as discussed in this chapter. Arrah-na-Pogue first opened in New York at Niblo’s Theatre on 12 July 1865 in a production overseen by Boucicault’s American agent, Edward Howard House. For the American reception of Boucicault’s major Irish melodramas, including Arrah-na-Pogue (a topic beyond the scope of my arguments here), see McFeely, Dion Boucicault, 13–21, 55, 77–106. 12. Boucicault, Dolmen Boucicault, 157. 13. Ibid., 140. 14. Ibid. Emphasis mine. 15. Ibid., 112; 147; 151; 152; 152. 16. For Shaw’s views in this regard, see Shaw, “Dear Harp of My Country!” For the Parker quote, see Parker, Plays:2, 155. Boucicault is a character in Parker’s Heavenly Bodies (1986), and this angry accusation is brought against Boucicault by Johnny Patterson, the Irish Singing Clown. It seems to encapsulate much of Parker’s frustration with Boucicault, as exemplified by the play’s plot and the overall implications of the dialogue. 17. McFeely, Dion Boucicault, 167. 18. Ibid., 163, 168–169. 19. As quoted in Ibid., 163. 20. As quoted in Ibid., 164. 21. Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 215–216; R.F. Foster, Paddy & Mr Punch, 220, 226, 230; Kiberd, Irish Classics, 379–398; Castle, “Ambivalence and Ascendancy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” 22. Earls, “Blood Relations.” 23. For more on “improvement” in The Snake’s Pass, see Stevens, Irish Scene in Somerville & Ross, 39–40, 195–196, 199. 24. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 246. 25. Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Gooding-Williams, “‘Look, a Negro!’.” 26. Stoker, Snake’s Pass, 11. 27. Ibid., 12; 11. 28. For the Irish patriotism in Farquhar’s Love and a Bottle, see Clare, “Why Did George Farquhar’s Work Turn Sectarian After The Constant Couple?,” 159–160, 167.

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29. As quoted in Ring, Erskine Childers, 29. 30. Béaslaí, Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland, 169; O’Connor, An Only Child / My Father’s Son, 148; Griffith, as quoted in Piper, Dangerous Waters, 219. 31. Trotter, Introduction to The Riddle of the Sands, xvii. 32. Childers, Riddle of the Sands, 78, 112; 200; 3; 143. 33. Boyle, Riddle of Erskine Childers, 55. 34. Ring, Erskine Childers, 19. 35. Nelson, “‘Murderous renegade’ or agent of the Crown?” 36. As quoted in Ring, Erskine Childers, xxv. 37. Ibid., 76. 38. For Boucicault’s generous financial support for Fenian prisoners and his campaigning of their behalf, see McFeely, Dion Boucicault, Chapter 6. For Stoker’s support for Irish Home Rule, see Hopkins, Bram Stoker, 89.

References Béaslaí, Piaras. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland, Volume 2. London: Harper, 1926. Print. Boucicault, Dion. The Dolmen Boucicault. Ed. David Krause. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964. Print. Bowen, Elizabeth. “The Idea of France.” In People, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen. Ed. Allan Hepburn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008. 61–65. Print. Boyle, Andrew. The Riddle of Erskine Childers. London: Hutchinson, 1977. Print. Castle, Gregory. “Ambivalence and Ascendancy in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” In Dracula  – Bram Stoker [Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism]. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Boston: Bedford, 2002. 518–537. Print. Cave, Richard Allen. “Staging the Irishman.” In Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790–1930. Eds. J.S.  Bratton et  al. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991. 83–96. Print. Childers, Erskine. The Riddle of the Sands. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Clare, David. Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print. Clare, David. “Why Did George Farquhar’s Work Turn Sectarian After The Constant Couple?” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 103.410 (2014): 159–168. 160. Print. Corcoran, Neil. Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Print. Corkery, Daniel. Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature. Cork: Cork UP, 1931. Print. Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler. Ireland’s Others: Gender and Ethnicity in Irish Literature and Popular Culture. Cork: Cork UP, 2001. Print.

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Davis, Leith. Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724–1874. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Print. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. London: Verso, 1995. Print. Earls, Brian. “Blood Relations.” drb.ie. Dublin Review of Books 21 (Spring 2012). Web. 13 September 2019. FitzGerald-Hoyt, Mary. William Trevor: Re-imagining Ireland. Dublin: Liffey, 2003. Print. Foster, R.F. Paddy & Mr Punch: Connections in Irish History and English History. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1993. Print. Gooding-Williams, Robert. “‘Look, a Negro!’” In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Violence. Ed. Robert Gooding-Williams. New York: Routledge, 1993. 157–177. Print. Hopkins, Lisa. Bram Stoker: A Literary Life. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print. Joyce, James. “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salome’.” In Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Ed. Kevin Barry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 148–151. Print. Kearney, Richard. The Irish Mind: Exploring Intellectual Traditions. Dublin: Wolfhound, 1985. Print. Kiberd, Declan. Irish Classics. London: Granta, 2000. Print. Killeen, Jarlath. The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and Ireland. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. Mahony, Robert. Jonathan Swift: The Irish Identity. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995. Print. McFeely, Deirdre. Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print. McLoughlin, Thomas. Contesting Ireland: Irish Voices Against England in the Eighteenth Century. Dublin: Four Courts, 1999. Print. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print. Nelson, Conor. “‘Murderous renegade’ or agent of the Crown? The riddle of Erskine Childers.” historyireland.com. History Ireland 22.3 (May/June 2014). Web. 25 August 2020. O’Connor, Frank. An Only Child / My Father’s Son. London: Penguin, 2005. Print. O’Toole, Fintan. A Traitor’s Kiss: A Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998. Print. Parker, Stewart. Plays:2: Northern Star / Heavenly Bodies / Pentecost. London: Methuen, 2000. Print. Pearse, P.H. The Letters of P.H. Pearse. Ed. Seamus Ó Buachalla. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1980. Print. Piper, Leonard. Dangerous Waters: The Life and Death of Erskine Childers. London: Hambledon and London, 2003. Print. Ring, Jim. Erskine Childers. London: John Murray, 1996. Print.

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Roberts, David. George Farquhar: A Migrant Life in Reverse. London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2018. Print. Shaw, Bernard. “Dear Harp of My Country!” In The Portable Bernard Shaw. Ed. Stanley Weintraub. New York: Penguin, 1986. 110–116. Print. Stevens, Julie Anne. The Irish Scene in Somerville & Ross. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007. Print. Stoker, Bram. The Snake’s Pass. Dingle: Brandon, 1990. Print. Trotter, David. Introduction to The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. vii–xviii. Print.

CHAPTER 4

Charlotte Brooke’s Impact on Ascendancy Women Writers from Maria Edgeworth to Lady Gregory

Abstract  Critics have long acknowledged that Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) is a “fundamental ‘growth-point’ for Anglo-­ Irish literature.” Brooke argues in an essay in the Reliques that poetry in Irish is “already music,” even before being set to an air. Leith Davis has shown that this idea—and Brooke’s belief that it might be possible to create Anglophone Irish literature that is also “already music”—inspired Thomas Moore, the Young Irelanders, and the Revivalists of the 1890s. While this is one major area of influence, another is the way she inspired several Irish Ascendency women writers who emerged after her, including Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (a.k.a. Lady Morgan), Mary Balfour, and Lady Gregory. Although various critics have discussed Brooke’s influence on these women, I examine unexpected ways in which these writers were inspired by Brooke but also the ways in which they consciously differed from her. Keywords  Charlotte Brooke • Maria Edgeworth • Lady Augusta Gregory • Irish Women’s Writing • Irish Language • Translation

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Clare, Irish Anglican Literature and Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68353-5_4

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Redoubtable Abbey Theatre co-founder and playwright Lady Gregory— who Bernard Shaw once described as “the greatest living Irish woman”— was born Augusta Persse at her family’s Co. Galway Big House, Roxborough, in 1852.1 In 1880, she married Sir William Gregory of Coole Park, an estate near Gort, Co. Galway. He was—like her own family—Unionist in politics, and his record during the Great Famine of 1845–1852 was more than a bit disturbing: during the crisis, he sponsored the Gregory Clause, which stated that tenants who possessed holdings over a certain size had to give up their land if they wanted to receive relief. This was long before Lady Gregory married him, but it gives a sense of the political atmosphere of her married household: she was surrounded by orthodox Unionists who shared the British Victorian upper-class conviction that people—or more accurately, the “lower orders”—should be effectively self-reliant and that the poor could not necessarily be trusted to work or tell the truth. In 1881, Gregory met the English anti-imperialist poet, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, and conducted a passionate eighteen-month affair with him. This inspired some of her first attempts at literature: she wrote a series of sonnets about their relationship, which Blunt later published anonymously in one of his volumes of poetry as “A Woman’s Sonnets.”2 The affair is also noteworthy in that she bonded with Blunt over his anti-imperialist views and came to share them.3 After the death of her husband in 1892, Gregory’s increasingly ardent Irish Nationalist sympathies manifested themselves in her decision to study the Irish language and to collect Irish folklore. She soon began publishing her re-tellings of Irish mythology and folktales in a consciously heightened form of Hiberno-English, which she called “Kiltartanese” (named for the barony where most of her tenants lived). She also used this dialect in the hit plays that she wrote for the theatre company she co-founded in 1899, the Irish Literary Theatre, which would later become Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey. Gregory’s decision to abandon the “splendid isolation” of her British-­ affiliated, Ascendancy background and engage with the culture of the Irish Catholic tenantry was undoubtedly a radical one. However, it was not unprecedented. Charlotte Brooke, the daughter of a Co. Cavan Big House, had made a similar decision in the late eighteenth century. Brooke’s study of the Irish language led to the publication of a landmark work in the history of Anglophone Irish literature: Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789).4 As we shall see, Brooke’s important publication—as well as her decision to engage with “native” Irish culture more generally—inspired

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several women tied to the Ascendancy to reach out to Gaelic Ireland. These figures include Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson (a.k.a. Lady Morgan), Mary Balfour, and finally Lady Gregory. It is the debts that these women owed to Brooke (and the ways in which they put her own stamp on the work that Brooke had started) which will be the primary focus of this chapter.

Charlotte Brooke As noted in the Introduction, most of the Anglo-Normans, or “Old English,” who came to Ireland in the twelfth century quickly learned the Irish language and became “more Irish than the Irish themselves”; by contrast, the Plantation settlers (i.e. the “New English”) had a much harder time gaining “possession of an authentic Irish identity.”5 However, during the mid- to late-eighteenth century, there was a growing interest in antiquarian pursuits among people from all denominational backgrounds in Ireland. The popularity of this antiquarian movement led a significant number of Irish Anglicans to cross the cultural gulf which separated the Ascendancy from their Catholic tenantry. Of all the people to cross that gulf and engage with Gaelic Ireland, arguably none had a bigger influence on the subsequent history of Anglophone Irish literature than Charlotte Brooke, the daughter of Henry Brooke (author of the popular novel The Fool of Quality [1765–1770] and owner of Rantavan House in Mullagh, Co. Cavan). As Robert Welch has shown, Charlotte Brooke was not the first to translate Irish poetry into English, but her Reliques of Irish Poetry from 1789 was, in his words, “to all intents and purposes the first printed anthology of Irish verse, and the first real body of verse translation from that language.”6 The Reliques also paid groundbreaking respect to Gaeilge by including the Irish-language originals of each poem or song that Brooke translated. Critics have long acknowledged the Reliques as a “fundamental ‘growth-point’ for Anglo-Irish literature.”7 An important 2006 study by Leith Davis has ably demonstrated one very important aspect of its influence. Brooke argues in the essay “Thoughts on Irish Song” from the Reliques that poetry in the Irish language is “already music,” even before being set to an air.8 Davis shows that this idea—and Brooke’s belief that it might be possible to create a new Irish literature in English which is also “already music”—became “general currency” quite quickly and inspired Thomas Moore, the Young Irelanders, and ultimately the Irish Literary

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Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.9 While this is one major area of influence, another—as noted above—was the fact that Brooke served as a role model for a number of Irish Ascendency women writers both during and for several decades after her time. After examining Brooke’s influence on important writers from the generation that came immediately after hers—Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, and Mary Balfour—I will explore the impact that Brooke had on Lady Gregory, one of the leading lights of the aforementioned Irish Literary Revival. Although several critics have discussed Brooke’s influence on these women, I would like to examine the unexpected ways in which they were inspired by Brooke but also the ways in which they consciously differed from her.

Maria Edgeworth Previous critics have mainly focussed on two aspects of Brooke’s influence on a writer from neighbouring Co. Longford, who was quite possibly a friend or at least acquaintance of Brooke and her family: Maria Edgeworth. These critics have been interested in the ways in which “Gracey Nugent” (a Turlough O’Carolan song which Edgeworth probably first came across in the Reliques) helped her to formulate the character of Grace Nugent from her classic 1812 novel The Absentee. They have also focussed on the ways in which Edgeworth faithfully carried on Brooke’s mission of explaining the Irish people to an English-speaking audience. These, however, are not the only ways in which Brooke influenced Edgeworth’s work. As I have briefly noted elsewhere, both Brooke and Edgeworth were unique among Irish Anglican people in their freedom from fear on the subject of Protestant intermarriage with Irish Catholics.10 Just as Brooke, in her preface to the Reliques maintained that “the portion of [British] blood which flows in our veins is rather ennobled than disgraced by the mingling tides that descended from our heroic [Irish] ancestors,” Edgeworth was similarly unperturbed by Ascendancy intermarriage with the Irish Catholic tenantry.11 In fact, as we can see from her novels, Edgeworth shows a remarkable open-mindedness on the subject given her class and the time and political context within which she was writing: In Castle Rackrent (1800), we are told that the Rackrents were originally the Catholic O’Shaughlins, and in Ennui (1809), we learn that the Glenthorns were originally the Catholic O’Shaughnessys. In The Absentee (1812), Grace Nugent, who is from a Catholic Jacobite background, mar-

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ries the Irish Anglican Lord Colambre. As regards Ormond (1817), the lords of Annaly (the heroine’s family) were originally O’Farrells. And … the Ormond Butlers had important Catholic branches in the family.12

Edgeworth’s scepticism regarding the importance of “high-born” ancestors and ethnic “purity” arguably finds its most direct expression in Ennui: we are informed late in that novel that the hero, who—through diligence and force of will—becomes a man of strong character and a success in his chosen profession of the law, is actually the son of poor, Irish Catholic parents. In other words, Edgeworth suggests that it is the material and educational advantages that he enjoyed while presumed to be an earl’s son which enabled him to succeed, not his genetics. In acknowledging such “mixing” between the Ascendancy and the Irish Catholic tenantry, Edgeworth was certainly being honest as regards history (indeed, her own family intermarried with the Catholic Tuites). Edgeworth’s bold stance on intermarriage seems to have been influenced by her literary hero Charlotte Brooke (as well as, quite likely, the Catholic antiquarian Sylvester O’Halloran and French Enlightenment thinking).13 This stance from Brooke and Edgeworth is remarkably out-of-synch with the common Irish Anglican view before, during, and after their time. An interesting comparison is the horror with which many later Irish Anglican writers treat such marriages—see, for example, Yeats in his play Purgatory (1938) or Edith Somerville in her late novel The Big House of Inver (1925).14 While Brooke was obviously an important influence on Edgeworth, we must not ignore the ways in which Edgeworth deliberately departed from her mentor. In fact, Edgeworth’s approach to bringing Irish culture to an English-speaking audience (be it Irish or British), differed markedly from that of her esteemed “neighbour.” Brooke was at pains to show the genius of the Catholic tenantry by translating their sagas, poems, and songs from the Irish language. In the Preface to the Reliques, she was keen to emphasise the beauty of the Irish language and the heroism and genius of the ancient inhabitants of the island. By contrast, Edgeworth and her father Richard, writing fourteen years after the Reliques in their An Essay on Irish Bulls (1803), baldly state: We … candidly confess that we are more interested in the fate of the present race of [Ireland’s] inhabitants than in the historian of St. Patrick … Brien Boru … M’Murrough, king of Leinster … [or] Diarmod … and by this

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declaration we have no fear of giving offence to any but rusty antiquaries. We think it somewhat, more to the honour of Ireland to enumerate the names of some of the men of genius whom she has produced: … Usher, Boyle … Congreve, Molyneux, Farquhar, sir Richard Steele, … Berkeley … Swift, T[homas] Sheridan … Goldsmith, Sterne … [Henry] Brooke … Macklin … Mrs. [Frances] Sheridan … Brinsley Sheridan, and Burke.15

Edgeworth is showing a sensitivity to the English perspective in championing English-speaking Irish heroes that the English were already familiar with and disposed to like (or at least respect), including Charlotte’s novelist father. Her savvy in this matter may have been based on her own significant exposure to England and the English mind (she was born in England and partially raised there). While Edgeworth could admire the intentions of Brooke and while she could admire ancient Gaelic genius, she could also see that one had a greater chance of demonstrating Irish worth to the English by pointing to the long line of celebrated Irish Anglican writers and thinkers from Archbishop James Ussher through Edmund Burke, than by translating into verse the heroic deeds of Cuchulain and Fionn mac Cumhaill, as Brooke did. Along these same lines, in Edgeworth’s novels, stories, and essays, the Irish language hardly seems to exist. There is a brief reference to tenants speaking to each other in Irish in The Absentee16 and to a man praying in Irish in the short story “To-Morrow” (1804).17 And, in Ormond, we are told that Sheelagh refers to the medicinal herbs by their Irish names.18 But these are the only appearances of the language in the fiction.19 The work in which the Irish language has its biggest presence—and it is still a very marginal one—is An Essay on Irish Bulls. In that book, Edgeworth argues at one point that Irish blunders in English were often the result of English being the speaker’s second language and later suggests that some remarks perceived to be Irish bulls are the result of idioms translated directly from the Irish language.20 In the main, however, Edgeworth, in her work, attempts to demonstrate Irish cleverness through dialogue spoken by Irish people in English. She seemed to believe that a future of harmony between Ireland and England depended on the Irish speaking English and was convinced that Irish wit would still shine through in the new language, as it was already doing in her own time. Thus, while Edgeworth was heavily influenced by Brooke’s aim to present Irish genius to the English-speaking world, she had very different ideas regarding how it should be accomplished. Edgeworth was perhaps

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influenced to focus more on Irish Anglican genius rather than Gaelic Irish genius because the 1798 Rebellion had once again increased English distrust of Irish Catholics. And her decision to encourage Irish use of the English language was perhaps influenced by a desire to see the Union (passed into law in 1800) succeed, even as her novels—especially Castle Rackrent—suggest that she felt deep scepticism regarding the Irish and English ability to cooperate politically, given their radically different cultural starting points. Lesa Ní Mhunghaile has pointed out that the absence of poems on Jacobite themes in Brooke’s Reliques is “significant,” given the fact that “Jacobitism formed a dominant theme in eighteenth-century Irish poetry.” However, Ní Mhunghaile also rightly notes that “the exclusion of such material is hardly surprising,” given that “much of it was anti-Protestant and seditious.”21 While Brooke may have been silent regarding Jacobitism in Ireland, Edgeworth chose to confront the subject in one of her greatest works. As W.J.  McCormack has shown, one of the major themes of Edgeworth’s The Absentee is the need for Britain to show “generosity to the Jacobite past” and not to confuse enlightened, sophisticated Catholics with those who would engage in “radical interference with existing class structures.”22 The fact that Edgeworth makes this point in large part through Grace Nugent (a character based on a song she probably learned from Brooke) is interesting and a hint that even as Edgeworth drew on Brooke for inspiration, she was willing to disagree with her literary hero’s approach to handling recent Irish history.

Sydney Owenson (a.k.a. Lady Morgan) Like Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson was also significantly indebted to Charlotte Brooke, paying tribute to her in her most famous novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), and in her memoirs.23 Owenson used Brooke’s translation of “Gracey Nugent” in her 1805 book Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, and her own version of “Gracey Nugent” in The Wild Irish Girl is obviously heavily inspired by the two versions that Brooke provided in the Reliques—the main version and the so-called “literal translation” that Brooke provided in a footnote.24 Owenson repeats several of Brooke’s more curious word choices, all of which are departures in varying degrees from the Irish-language original, including “the palm of excellence,”25 “mien,”26 “cygnet,”27 “alabaster,”28 and, finally, the bizarre reference to Gracey’s teeth being “arranged in beautiful order”29 instead

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of being like a “string of pearls,” as in the Irish original.30 And, of course, Owenson copies what Robert O’Driscoll has shown was Brooke’s biggest departure from O’Carolan’s version—treating the lyric as a love song rather than a commissioned tribute to a patron full of the “stock phrases” that usually filled such odes.31 Brooke’s influence on Owenson can also be seen in the enthusiastic, amateur antiquarianism that runs through the work of both. Finally, like Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson was trying to copy Brooke in explaining Gaelic Irish ways to an English-speaking readership. Despite all of the evidence showing that Owenson was a disciple of Brooke, she differed in key ways from her mentor. By far the most significant divergence was their contrasting views on the symbolic relationship between Ireland and Britain. In Brooke’s Preface to the Reliques, she depicts Ireland and Britain as “sister[s],” and goes on to suggest that Ireland is the “elder sister,” because of the fact that Ireland has the older culture of the two.32 Owenson, on the other hand, in The Wild Irish Girl, suggests that, in the wake of the Acts of Union, the bond between the two islands is that of husband and wife. In the book, Anglo-Irish political difficulties are smoothed over when Glorvina, the Irish heroine, is given in marriage to Horatio, the English son of an Earl. This is only the first instance of the common trope in Irish literature that Robert Tracy has dubbed “the Glorvina solution.”33 “The Glorvina solution” has appeared in various guises in the Irish canon over the years—perhaps most famously in Dion Boucicault’s The Shaughraun (1874). Subversions of the trope have appeared in several later works, such as Bernard Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island (1904), Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1929), Brendan Behan’s The Hostage (1958), and even Neil Jordan’s film The Crying Game (1992). Owenson’s decision to depict the relationship as one of husband and wife may have been inspired by the historic rendering of Ireland as a female in the Irish-language aisling poems, first developed as a genre in the seventeenth century, and the pre-Arnoldian notions, already current in her time, that pictured the Celts as feminine and imaginative and the Saxons as masculine and practical. The disturbing thing about Owenson’s picturing of a marriage between female Ireland and male Britain is that the Union was forced on the Irish people and only passed thanks to extensive corruption; therefore, the so-called marriage has looked to some commentators more like a rape. In the case of The Wild Irish Girl, one is haunted by the spectre of a forced union through the fact that Glorvina is

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so silent at the end of the book. Critics have long debated how aware Owenson was of the fact that the Englishman got by far the better deal in the marriage—a marriage which silenced the usually loquacious Glorvina and forced her family to overlook the original injustice that robbed them of their lands. I would argue that Owenson felt that the best hope for Ireland’s future involved cooperation between Irish Catholics and their Ascendancy overlords and that this was, to her mind, the best way to symbolically suggest that. Regardless, it is a long way from her hero Brooke’s picture of Ireland and Britain as sisters, with Ireland deserving the respect due to an elder sibling.

Mary Balfour The Derry-born poet and playwright Mary Balfour was—as her surname suggests—of Ulster Scots descent, and yet her family was not Presbyterian (like most Ulster Scots) but Anglican. Indeed, her father was a Church of Ireland minister. Balfour, who as an adult ran a school in Limavady and later in Belfast, got caught up in the antiquarian movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Inspired by the likes of Charlotte Brooke and J.C. Walker, she learned Irish and deeply immersed herself in Irish folklore and history. She was also interested in the revival of Irish music. Starting in 1808, she served as a committee member for Edward Bunting’s Harp Society, which taught blind children how to play the harp in the traditional Irish manner (thereby preserving an art that was in danger of dying out). Balfour contributed nine sets of lyrics—eight translations from old Irish-language poems and one original work—to the second (1809) edition of Bunting’s General Collection of Ancient Irish Music. These lyrics, like the translations and original poems included in her 1810 verse collection, Hope, a Poetical Essay: With Various Other Poems, demonstrate the influence of Charlotte Brooke upon her. Most obviously, Balfour follows Brooke in translating Irish-language materials into English verse, but she also creates—as Brooke did with “Mäon” (an original verse tale that concludes the Reliques)—new poems based on mythological and legendary materials. A notable example of this from Balfour’s work is the epic poem “Kathleen O’Neil” from Hope, in which Balfour re-tells the myth that a young woman called Kathleen, who was an exalted member of Ulster’s powerful O’Neil/O’Neill clan, was once abducted by the Sidhe—that is, by the supernatural “fairy folk.”

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(Balfour would later adapt this same folktale into the aptly titled melodrama Kathleen O’Neil, which was a hit at the Belfast Theatre in 1814.) As Leith Davis points out, both Brooke’s “Mäon” and Balfour’s “Kathleen O’Neil” include a framing device, in which the story is told by an Irish Gaelic person to an English-speaking person. Between their common approaches to translation and this seeming intertextual link, it is clear how much Balfour owed to Brooke. And Balfour did not hide her multiple debts to Brooke. She can even be said to have advertised her particular interest in “Mäon”: the epigraph to Balfour’s Hope comes from the introduction to Brooke’s verse tale. Like the other women profiled in this chapter, Balfour did not copy Brooke’s approach and perspective completely. In terms of differences between them, Leith Davis wisely points to the contrasting aspects of the framing devices used in “Mäon” and “Kathleen O’Neil.”34 In “Mäon,” the English-speaking recipient of the tale is an Irish Protestant woman writer, and—as Davis notes—the tale is presented as a straightforward “gift … to the Anglo-Irish elite.”35 That is, it will inspire the woman hearing it to spread the word to her “ken” (presumably, both her fellow members of the Ascendancy and the British across the Irish Sea), who will recognise in a new way the power of Irish Gaelic culture.36 By contrast, the recipient of the tale in “Kathleen O’Neil” is a “weary man” and a “Sagsanach” (i.e. a Sasanach, the Irish word for a Saxon or English person), and, while the endnote explaining the meaning of “Sagsanach” seems to imply that this character is an English traveller to Ireland, it is not made perfectly clear.37 That is to say, the character could conceivably be an Irish person of English descent. This would seem to be borne out by the poem’s ending, in which the “Sagsanach” refers to Ireland as his “native Erin.”38 What is clear is that hearing the tale has filled the listener with fervent love and respect for Ireland and its Gaelic culture. This even inspires him to launch into the “lyric voice” at the end of the poem; however, as Davis notes, he (and, by extension, Balfour) is “much less certain about the reception” of this tale by other British-affiliated listeners than Brooke and the female character in “Mäon” were.39 In fact, the “Sagsanach” in “Kathleen O’Neil” hopes that, in sharing the tale, Ireland may be glorified and says that he does not care about gaining fame for himself, but he seems to suggest that there is a chance that both he and Gaelic Ireland may continue to “pine” in “sad obscurity.”40 This speaks to a greater pessimism on Balfour’s part regarding future Irish/British relations—both between the two islands and even within Ireland itself. This may relate to

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the disappointments associated with the failed 1798 Rebellion, which Brooke did not live to see and which Balfour’s poetic tribute in Hope to the ’98 hero Betsy Gray indicates she supported. However, it also highlights the other key difference between Brooke and Balfour. As mentioned above, in making her translations, Brooke chose to remove any Jacobitism that was present in the original, Irish-language works. By contrast, Balfour’s engagement with “the ’98” in her poetry proves that she was much more engaged with contemporary political realities. That said, as Guy Beiner, Davis, and the present writer have shown, Balfour ultimately downplays Irish/British tensions in her work, even as it is clear where her political sympathies lie.41

Lady Gregory Stephen C. Behrendt and James Kelly have demonstrated that Brooke and Balfour inspired a number of Irish Anglican women poets working in their wake. Under the influence of Brooke’s Reliques and Balfour’s poetry in the Bunting collection and Hope, these lesser-known figures wrote epic and shorter poems inspired by Irish mythological and legendary materials. Examples of such works include Mary St. John’s Ellauna: A Legend of the Thirteenth Century (1815), Sarah Steele’s Eva, An Historical Poem (1816), Louisa Stuart Costello’s Redwald: A Tale of Mona (1819), Catherine Luby’s The Spirit of the Lakes: or, Mucross Abbey (1822), Vincentia Rodgers’s Cluthan and Malvina: An Ancient Legend (1823), and Hannah Maria Bourke’s O’Donoghue, Prince of Killarney (1830).42 However, these women had tenuous or non-existent ties to the Irish language. By contrast, Lady Gregory was an Ascendancy woman writer who followed in the footsteps of Brooke and Balfour by significantly immersing herself in Irish Gaelic culture. Gregory does not mention Mary Balfour in her published writings, but she does pay tribute to Charlotte Brooke. In Gregory’s own words, “Miss Brooke’s Reliques” is one of “the authorities I have been chiefly helped by in putting … together” Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), her classic prose re-telling of stories from the Ulster Cycle.43 That said, one must be careful not to overemphasise the influence of Brooke on Gregory, given the number of decades between Brooke’s career and her own. This is especially true, since it is clear that Gregory was also inspired by mid-­nineteenth-­ century figures who created new works from Irish-language sources, such as Samuel Ferguson and James Clarence Mangan. Regardless, Lucy

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McDiarmid and Maureen Waters are right to suggest that Gregory is quite likely to have been encouraged by the example of Brooke, a fellow Ascendancy woman, as she broke with social expectations by learning Irish and leaving the drawing-room to connect with the Irish Catholic tenants on her estate.44 After all, as Robert Welch has noted, the degree to which Gregory’s activities “exactly parallel” those of Brooke a century earlier is remarkable.45 What’s more, the aims of Brooke and Gregory were very similar. To borrow a phrase Joep Leerssen once applied to Brooke, they both sought to be a “mediator … between the Irish-Gaelic and Anglo-Irish literary traditions.”46 And the means by which they sought to mediate between the two traditions was the same: translating Irish-language sagas, poems, and songs into English. It must also be admitted, however, that the translations by the two women may unwittingly reveal the English or British sides of their culturally hybrid Irish Anglican identities. Both writers censored their original Irish-language sources, excluding parts that they thought would make the Irish look too libidinous or violent to the eyes of English readers47 or even the eyes of Trinity professors like Robert Atkinson and J.P. Mahaffy who had long insisted that Irish-language literature was “almost intolerably low in tone.”48 Brooke and Gregory both sought to show the ancient Irish heroes in the best light possible but in doing so often seemed to recast them in the mould of English public school boys at Harrow and Eton, giving them what now seem like very English values and attributes. Consider, for example, Brooke’s insistence that Cuchulain was full of “high-wrought honour” and the Irish bards full of “pure honour … disinterested patriotism,—and manners of a degree of refinement, totally astonishing.”49 Consider also what Ní Mhunghaile has referred to as Brooke’s “imposition of the concept of chivalry on the text[s]” and her decision to call “the heroes of the Ulster and Fenian Cycles … ‘knights’.”50 These all seem like direct appeals to English sympathy, as do what critics have called the “Victorian” morality of Lady Gregory’s Irish sagas.51 This is especially strange in the case of Brooke given that, in setting out to create the Reliques, at least part of her aim was to correct the false impression that the eighteenth-century Scottish writer/forger James Macpherson gave of her favourite Irish heroes in making them “so polished in their manners.”52 In spite of all of these similarities in aim and practice, Brooke and Gregory did diverge in one clear way. Brooke translated her Irish-language

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sources into the florid English poetic style of her own day, filling her translations with exaggerated emotions and “rhetorical, … exclamatory” statements.53 In choosing to translate ancient Irish works into an imitation of the late Augustan poets and the sentimental, pre-Romantic English poets of her own time, critics believe Brooke betrayed the spirit of the “delicate,” “witty,” often subtly “ironic” Irish originals she was translating.54 As Robert Welch has complained, her translations are: clogged … with the fanciful poeticised meanderings within rigidly stylised forms, borrowed from contemporary English verse, which, itself, was in dire need of re-invigoration.55

Lady Gregory, by contrast (and as was noted above), translated her Irish-language sources into the kind of Hiberno-English she heard spoken by the people on her estate in the barony of Kiltartan. Specifically, she was attempting to create a poetic version of the speech of those who think in Irish but speak in English. In this she was following the inadvertent example of Douglas Hyde, who had provided literal prose translations after his own poeticised translations in Love Songs of Connaught (1893), never realising that the curious syntax of these literal translations would be of much more interest to readers like Gregory than his own lacklustre, conventional, “Victorian” English versions.56 Lady Gregory’s Kiltartan dialect would of course go on to help fire the imaginations and inspire the endeavours of W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge, as both were happy to acknowledge. Despite this divergence in the forms of English they used, Gregory’s language was at times closer to that of Brooke than I have hitherto suggested. When she wanted to write an epic piece for the theatre, such as the work that may well be her masterpiece, Grania (1912), her love of English literary classics would shine through, resulting in a strange mix of Hiberno-­ English and the high-flown English of famous writers from the Elizabethan through the mid-Victorian eras. In Grania, there are echoes of Shakespeare (“made as if to,” “on the morrow,” “I bade you,” and a reference to “askings” instead of questions)57 and the King James Bible (“should/would be well pleased” and “before the making of the world”).58 And here are additional examples of phrases from Grania paired with notable occasions when they were used in older English literature:

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1. “forth and hither” (Abraham Cowley’s “On the Death of Mr. Jordan: Second Master at Westminster School” [c. 1656])59 2. “you were false to me” (redolent of Victorian melodrama and, in fact, used in T.A. Palmer’s popular stage adaptation of Ellen Woods’s 1861 novel East Lynne)60 3. “I have made an end of” (which appears frequently in The Diary of Samuel Pepys [written between 1660–1669])61 4. “Would not you be content” (Thomas Hooker’s extended sermon The Soules Humiliation [1640])62 5. “love entire” (John Dryden’s verse drama Tyrannick Love; or, The Royal Martyr [1669])63 6. “tame and timid” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey’s 1794 verse drama The Fall of Robespierre)64 7. “I am no way … afraid” (recalling a famous line ascribed to the Earl of Strafford in Catherine Macaulay’s The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line [published between 1763 and 1783])65 8. “let them … and welcome” (Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa [1748])66 What’s more, Gregory bravely includes numerous, rather fusty, mid-­ Victorian turns of phrase in her script (“the shade and shelter of the … wood,” “he made away” [as in, “he left”], “Are you not better pleased now…?,” “bade you leave,” “malicious whisperings,” and “as if worsted” [i.e. in a contest]).67 And yet she somehow manages to avoid making the dialogue sound too inhuman or cloyingly overblown—indeed, the exchanges are often deeply moving.

Conclusion Maria Edgeworth, Sydney Owenson, Mary Balfour, and Lady Gregory all followed Charlotte Brooke in deciding to abandon the social expectations placed upon Ascendancy women and to engage with Gaelic Irish culture in a profound way. They also carried on her mission of promoting Irish genius to the Anglophone world, but—as strong independent women in their own right—they disagreed with Brooke in certain ways and therefore adjusted their methods of carrying on that mission to suit their own beliefs and talents. Despite the ways they may have consciously or even unconsciously differed from Brooke, these women were still responding to the seismic shock of her accomplishments. Brooke’s important influence on

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these women and many other writers proves Frank O’Connor’s contention that Charlotte Brooke “opened a way that Ferguson, Mangan and Yeats would follow.”68 In the end, her enduring contribution was that she showed Irish writers that it was possible to be (authentically) Irish in the English language. Of course, as we have seen, it was not just male writers like those listed by O’Connor or Revivalists such as Douglas Hyde, George Moore, and J.M. Synge that Brooke inspired. Any list of writers influenced by Brooke is incomplete if it excludes women: especially if it excludes the two Ascendancy women featured in this chapter who wrote world masterpieces. I am referring, of course, to Maria Edgeworth, whose Irish novels were beloved of Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Ivan Turgenev,69 and the woman discussed at the very start and end of this chapter, Lady Gregory. Gregory may be relatively neglected by many critics and theatremakers today, but time will surely remind them of the power and brilliance of her best work. That includes—among other plays—Grania, and two plays which helped inspire the drive for Irish independence and which certainly betray some Irish Anglican “anti-Englishness”: 1902’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (co-written with W.B. Yeats) and 1903’s The Rising of the Moon (beloved of the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins).70

Notes 1. As quoted in Laurence and Grene, eds., Shaw, Lady Gregory, and the Abbey, 66. 2. See Blunt, “A Woman’s Sonnets.” They were first published in Blunt’s Love Lyrics and Songs of Proteus (1892). 3. This was by no means a straightforward conversion, and, for a helpful discussion of Gregory’s long-time struggle between what Lucy McDiarmid has called her “soft Fenianism” and what could be perceived as lingering Unionist tendencies, see Valente, Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 77–81. For the original quote from McDiarmid, see McDiarmid, “The Demotic Lady Gregory,” 225. 4. The title of Brooke’s anthology is, of course, a nod to Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). 5. Brown, Ireland’s Literature, 189. It should be noted that Brown is actually writing about the descendants of those settlers. 6. Welch, History of Verse Translation, 25. 7. Ibid., 42. 8. Brooke, Reliques, 229.

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9. White, “Review of Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender by Leith Davis,” 142. White is summarising the arguments in Davis, Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender, 77–94. 10. Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 50. 11. Brooke, Reliques, VIII. 12. Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 49–50. For proof of Grace Nugent’s Catholic Jacobite background, see McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, 139–147. 13. It may also have been influenced by the fact that Maria’s second cousin was the Longford-born L’Abbé Henry Essex Edgeworth de Firmont, a Catholic priest in France who famously served as confessor to Louis XVI.  Maria and her father Richard never disavowed their link to this Catholic branch of the family, and—in fact—Maria benefitted from L’Abbé Edgeworth’s social contacts during her visit to France in 1820. 14. The novel is credited to Edith Somerville and (Violet) Martin Ross, despite the fact that it was written after Ross’s death in 1915. The novel’s plot was suggested to Somerville by a letter that Ross sent her, which details the history of a Co. Galway Big House family that she knew. (Somerville & Ross, Selected Letters, 294.) Somerville claimed that there was one other reason for giving Ross co-credit for this novel and other post-1915 works: she said that she communicated with Ross’s departed spirit as she wrote them. (See Greene, “Demystifying and Resituating the Somerville and Ross Writing Partnership,” 212.) For more on the Irish Anglican fear of intermarriage and “cross-­ breeding” between Protestants and Catholics, see Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, Chapter Three. 15. Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, 122–123. 16. Edgeworth, The Absentee, 168. 17. Edgeworth, Tales and Novels, 458. 18. Edgeworth, Ormond, 47. 19. Edgeworth’s father Richard wrote the Castle Rackrent glossary note which refers to the “Irish words” sung at funerals in Ireland. (Butler, Notes to Castle Rackrent / Ennui, 350.) 20. Edgeworth, Essay on Irish Bulls, 22, 85. 21. Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, XXXVI. 22. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, 152. 23. Owenson, Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, 89; Morgan, Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, 261. 24. Brooke, Reliques, 247. 25. Brooke, Reliques, 247; Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, 91. “Palm” meaning a “prize.” In the Irish original, Gracey does not win any prizes; she merely

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“excels in fame and in understanding … the fine clever women of the provinces.” (Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, 132.) 26. Brooke, Reliques, 247; Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, 91. Meaning “gait.” No such line exists in the Irish original. 27. Brooke, Reliques, 248; Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, 91. In the Irish original, it was merely a “swan,” not necessarily a young one. (Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, 132.) 28. Brooke, Reliques, 248; Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, 91. Instead of simply “lime,” as in the Irish original. (Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, 132.) 29. Brooke, Reliques, 248; Owenson, Wild Irish Girl, 91. 30. Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, 132. 31. O’Driscoll, Ascendancy of the Heart, 58. See also Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, 133. 32. Brooke, Reliques, VII, X; VII. 33. Tracy, Unappeasable Host, 31; Tracy, “Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan.” It must be noted here that Tracy also applies the term “the Glorvina solution” to situations in which the gentleman who marries the colleen is (in his words) “Anglo-Irish”—that is, a native Irish member of the Anglican Ascendancy. 34. Davis, “Malvina’s Daughters,” 152–153. 35. Davis, “Malvina’s Daughters,” 153. 36. Brooke, Reliques, 369. 37. Balfour, Hope, 43, 81. 38. Balfour, Hope, 80. 39. Davis, “Malvina’s Daughters,” 153. 40. Balfour, Hope, 80. 41. Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance, 298; Davis, “Malvina’s Daughters,” 149; Clare, “Mary Balfour’s Kathleen O’Neil.” 42. Behrendt, British Women Poets, 275–276; Kelly, “Writing under the Union,” 65–66. 43. Gregory, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 360; 359. 44. McDiarmid and Waters, Introduction to Selected Writings, xxxix. See also Welch, History of Verse Translation, 4. 45. Welch, History of Verse Translation, 4. 46. Leerssen, Mere Irish and Fíor-Gael, 1996. 363. 47. McDiarmid and Waters, Introduction to Selected Writings, xxviii; Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, XXXV, XLI. 48. As quoted in Gregory, Seventy Years, 392. (Gregory explains in this memoir that her Cuchulain of Muirthemne was a rebuttal of this assertion.) 49. Brooke, Reliques, vii. 50. Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, XLII. 51. McDiarmid and Waters, Introduction to Selected Writings, xxviii.

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52. Walker, Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards, 42n. Macpherson attempted to pass off old Irish sagas as ancient mythological material from Scotland which he had “discovered.” 53. Welch, History of Verse Translation, 38. For more on the “inflated” emotions and imagery in the Reliques, see Ní Mhunghaile, Reliques, XLI, XLIV. 54. Welch, History of Verse Translation, 38; 39; 38. 55. Ibid., 40. 56. Ibid., 155. It should be noted that the “literal translations” included by Brooke in the Reliques did not, like Hyde’s, replicate Irish-language syntax. 57. Gregory, Selected Writings, 385, 387; 388; 394. 58. Ibid., 395, 409; 408. 59. Gregory, Selected Writings, 384; Cowley, The Works of Abraham Cowley. 34. 60. Gregory, Selected Writings, 393; Palmer, East Lynne, 43. 61. Gregory, Selected Writings, 394; see, for example, Pepys, Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 7, 51, 87, 102. 62. Gregory, Selected Writings, 399; Hooker, Soules Humiliation, 219. 63. Gregory, Selected Writings, 400; Dryden, Dramatick Works, 429. 64. Gregory, Selected Writings, 406; Coleridge and Southey, Fall of Robespierre, 17. 65. Gregory, Selected Writings, 421; Macaulay, History of England, 480. 66. Gregory, Selected Writings, 421; Richardson, History of Clarissa Harlowe, 163. 67. Gregory, Selected Writings, 396; 397; 399; 404; 411; 420. 68. O’Connor, Backward Look, 131. 69. Murray, Maria Edgeworth, 38–39. 70. For Collins’s love of this play, see Pilz, “From Gort to Antarctica.” It should be noted that, during 2020, New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre and Galway’s Druid Theatre Company both produced multiple one-acts by Gregory. Hopefully, these productions will prove to be early indications of a general/wider rediscovery of the playwright by theatremakers.

References Balfour, Mary. Hope, a Poetical Essay: With Various Other Poems. Belfast: Smyth and Lyons, 1810. Print. Behrendt, Stephen C. British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. Print. Beiner, Guy. Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Print. Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen. “A Woman’s Sonnets.” In The Poetical Works of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, Vol. I. London: Macmillan, 1914. 347–352. Print.

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Brown, Terence. Ireland’s Literature. Mullingar: Lilliput, 1988. Print. Butler, Marilyn. Notes to Castle Rackrent / Ennui, by Maria Edgeworth. London: Penguin, 1992. Print. Clare, David. Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print. Clare, David. “Mary Balfour’s Kathleen O’Neil (1814): An Expression or Betrayal of Her Ulster Scots Background?” In The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716–2016)  – Volume 1 (1716–1992). Eds. David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2021. Chapter Six [forthcoming]. In Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and Robert Southey. The Fall of Robespierre: An Historic Drama. Whitefish: Kessinger, 2004. Print. Cowley, Abraham. The Works of Abraham Cowley, Vol. One. London: Kearsley, 1806. Print. Davis, Leith. “Malvina’s Daughters: Irish Women Poets and the Sign of the Bard.” In Ireland and Romanticism: Publics, Nations and Scenes of Cultural Production. Ed. Jim Kelly. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 141–160. Print. Davis, Leith. Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender: The Construction of Irish National Identity, 1724–1874. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Print. Dryden, John. The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq. London: Tonsor, 1725. Print. Edgeworth, Maria. The Absentee. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988. 168. Print. Edgeworth, Maria. An Essay on Irish Bulls. Dublin: UCD Press, 2006. Print. Edgeworth, Maria. Ormond. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1990. Print. Edgeworth, Maria. Tales and Novels, Vol. 2: Popular Tales. London: Bohn et al., 1870. Print. Greene, Nicole Pepinster. “Demystifying and Resituating the Somerville and Ross Writing Partnership, 1889–1915.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 39.2 (2016): 196–217. Print. Gregory, Lady Augusta. Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster. London: John Murray, 1911. Print. Gregory, Lady Augusta. Selected Writings. Eds. Lucy McDiarmid and Maureen Waters. London: Penguin, 1995. Print. Gregory, Lady Augusta. Seventy Years, 1852–1922. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1974. Print. Hooker, Thomas. The Soules Humiliation. London: Cotes / Crooke, 1640. Print. Kelly, James. “Writing under the Union, 1800–1845.” In A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature. Eds. Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. 59–76. Print. Laurence, Dan H. and Nicholas Grene, eds. Shaw, Lady Gregory, and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993. Print.

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Leerssen, Joep. Mere Irish and Fíor-Gael: Studies in the Idea of Irish Nationality, its Development and Literary Expression prior to the Nineteenth Century. Cork: Cork UP, 1996. Print. Macaulay, Catherine. The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, Vol. 2. London: Nourse, 1765. Print. McCormack, W.J. Ascendancy and Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History From 1789 to 1939. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Print. McDiarmid, Lucy. “The Demotic Lady Gregory.” In High and Low Moderns: Literature and Culture, 1889–1939. Eds. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 212–234. Print. McDiarmid, Lucy, and Maureen Waters. Introduction to Selected Writings, by Lady Gregory. London: Penguin, 1995. xi–xliv. Print. Morgan, Lady [Sydney Owenson]. Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Vol. I. London: Allen, 1853. Print. Murray, Patrick. Maria Edgeworth: A Study of the Novelist. Cork: Mercier, 1971. Print. Ní Mhunghaile, Lesa. Introduction, Translations, and Notes to Reliques of Irish Poetry, by Charlotte Brooke. Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2009. Print. O’Connor, Frank. The Backward Look: A Survey of Irish Literature. London: Macmillan, 1967. Print. O’Driscoll, Robert. An Ascendancy of the Heart: Ferguson and the Beginnings of Modern Irish Literature in English. Dublin: Dolmen, 1976. Print. Owenson, Sydney [Lady Morgan]. The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. Palmer, T.A. (after Ellen Woods). East Lynne. New  York: Samuel French, 1899. Print. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Vol. 7. Ed. Henry B.  Wheatley. New York: Croscup, 1894. Print. Pilz, Anna. “From Gort to Antarctica: Lady Gregory’s Audiences and The Rising of the Moon (1903).” In The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716–2016)  – Volume 1 (1716–1992). Eds. David Clare, Fiona McDonagh, and Justine Nakase. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2021. Chapter Ten [forthcoming]. In Press. Richardson, Samuel. The History of Clarissa Harlowe: In a Series of Letters, Volume 5. Basil: Legrand, 1792. Print. Somerville, E.Œ. & Martin Ross. The Selected Letters of Somerville & Ross. Ed. Gifford Lewis. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. Print. Tracy, Robert. “Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40 (1985): 1–22. Print. Tracy, Robert. The Unappeasable Host: Studies in Irish Identities. Dublin: UCD Press, 1998. Print.

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Valente, Joseph. The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. Print. Walker, Joseph Cooper. Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards. London / Dublin: White, 1786. Print. Welch, Robert. A History of Verse Translation from the Irish 1789–1897. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988. Print. White, Harry. “Review of Music, Postcolonialism, and Gender by Leith Davis.” Journal of the Sociology for Musicology in Ireland 3 (2007–8): 141–143. Print.

CHAPTER 5

C.S. Lewis and the Irish Literary Canon

Abstract  Only a handful of the over three hundred books written about the life and work of Belfast-born C.S. Lewis discuss his keen interest in the Irish literary canon. On one level, the tendency among commentators to concentrate on Lewis’s relationship to the English literary canon is perfectly understandable. After all, as a member of the English faculty at Oxford and later Cambridge and as someone educated at British public schools in England and Belfast, he was steeped in the work of English writers, and this left an obvious imprint on his literary output. However, as this chapter demonstrates, Lewis—who self-identified as Irish throughout his life—was significantly shaped by and/or shared particular preoccupations with the great Irish writers who came before him or emerged alongside him (including ones whose work he did not particularly appreciate). Keywords  C.S. Lewis • Northern Irish Writers • The Chronicles of Narnia • Irish Identities • Ulster Protestants As surprising as it might be for most fans of literature to learn, the novelist, poet, literary critic, and Christian apologist C.S. Lewis was actually born and raised in Belfast and self-identified as Irish throughout his life. In fact, even though he resided in England full-time upon his graduation from

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Oxford University in 1923, he returned to Ireland almost every year for his holidays for the rest of his life and even insisted to those in doubt: “I’m Irish, not English.”1 Despite Lewis’s numerous professions of Irishness, only a handful of the over three hundred books written about his life and work discuss his interest in and his numerous ties to the Irish literary canon in any depth.2 On one level, the tendency among critics and biographers to concentrate on Lewis’s relationship to the English literary canon is perfectly understandable. After all, as a member of the English faculty at Oxford and later Cambridge and as someone educated at British public schools in England (Wynyard School, Cherbourg House, Malvern College) and Belfast (Campbell College), he was steeped in the work of English writers, and this left an obvious imprint on his literary output. To cite only the most prominent examples, Lewis’s The Great Divorce (1946), Surprised By Joy (1955), and “The Dark Tower” (written c. 1939) have titles inspired by the poetry of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Robert Browning, respectively. Additionally, Lewis learned how to depict a character’s moment of “undeception” from Jane Austen; and Jadis (“The White Witch”) from The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) shares more than a passing resemblance to the title character of H. Rider Haggard’s novel, She (1886–1887).3 Perhaps most significantly, Lewis learned how to permeate a work in the imagery associated with one of the seven planets of medieval cosmology from Geoffrey Chaucer. (As Michael Ward has shown, each one of the seven Chronicles of Narnia is rife with the symbols and ideas associated with a different planet—an idea that Lewis picked up from Chaucer’s decision to soak works such as The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and The Compleynt of Mars in astrological imagery.)4 However, this excessive focus on English influences has come at a cost: critics have—in the main—significantly underestimated the degree to which Lewis was shaped by and/or shared particular preoccupations with the major Irish writers who came before or emerged alongside him (including ones whose work he did not particularly appreciate). This interest in writers from both England and Ireland speaks to Lewis’s Irish/British hybridity.5 That said, in Lewis’s autobiography, the aforementioned Surprised by Joy, he discusses the “hatred” that he conceived for England upon being sent to boarding school there at ten and admits that it took “many years” to get over “the quarrel.”6 As shall be shown below, even though Lewis eventually learned to appreciate England, his comments on works by the Irish writers he admired—and the mark that those works left on his own oeuvre—amply demonstrate that he viewed

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the English with an outsider’s critical eye for his entire life. As his biographer A.N. Wilson once wrote, Lewis—within “a deep part of himself”— “was always to remain a stranger” in England.7

W.B. Yeats and Irish Modernists Arguably, the primary Irish influence on C.S. Lewis was the Dublin-born, Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. As a teenager, Lewis fell in love with Yeats’s poetry and drama, once describing him to Belfast friend Arthur Greeves as “an author exactly after my own heart.”8 Yeats had great appeal for Lewis, because, unlike other contemporary poets, Yeats “believed seriously in Magic.”9 Lewis was also devoted to Yeats because he rated his poetry very highly. In 1915, he stated that Yeats and Kipling were the only poets from “the present crew” whose work is likely to “survive.”10 Lewis was extremely proud of the fact that he got to meet the poet on two occasions while the Yeats family were living in Oxford. Lewis once wrote, “I count [Yeats] one of the funniest raconteurs I ever heard … [H]e had a wonderful—specially Irish—gift of combining his perfectly serious belief in magic with a mischievous audacity. An Englishman never knew where to have him.”11 In 1950, Lewis admitted that he based the Magician in his 1926 narrative poem Dymer on Yeats “as I saw him” during these two meetings at Oxford.12 Terence Brown has suggested that the figure of Merlin from the science fiction novel That Hideous Strength (1945) may also be based on Lewis’s impressions of Yeats.13 However, Merlin’s physical brutishness and verbal gruffness in the novel do not resemble the dreamy Yeats, as described by Lewis in letters to his father, his brother, and Greeves. While Merlin may not be based on Yeats, Lewis may have been thinking of the poet when writing the final two instalments of his science fiction trilogy, Perelandra (1943) and the aforementioned That Hideous Strength. Lewis’s descriptions of the hero Ransom in his cottage communing with unseen aliens echoes his descriptions of the otherworldly Yeats in his Oxford residence, ever open to unseen spiritual forces. Lewis wrote that in Yeats’s house, “you sit on hard antique chairs by candle light in an oriental room and listen in silence while the great man talks about magic and ghosts and mystics,” as well as “cabbalism and ‘the Hermetic knowledge’.”14 Lewis said that he and other visitors were stunned into silence by Yeats’s “eloquence and presence, which are very great,” but were also somewhat spooked by the sitting room’s dim light,

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all the Blake portraits of “devils and monsters,” the “orange coloured curtains,” and the strange objects from around the world which Lewis said “I can’t describe … because I don’t know their names.”15 Lewis confessed to Greeves in a letter, “That room and that voice would make you believe anything.”16 A haunted atmosphere similar to that in Yeats’s house is evoked at the beginning of Perelandra. When the narrator visits Ransom’s cottage, he is very unnerved by his suspicion that invisible, interstellar creatures are all around him. In describing Ransom since his return from space, the narrator says, “Little things in his conversation, little mannerisms, accidental allusions which he made and then drew back with an awkward apology, all suggested that he was keeping strange company; that there were—well, Visitors—at that cottage.”17 While these acknowledged and possible influences of Yeats the man on Lewis’s work are noteworthy (as are the interests that the two writers shared in the planets and the work of William Blake), of even greater importance is Yeats’s overwhelming influence on Lewis’s first collection of poetry, Spirits in Bondage from 1919—a collection which bore the more Hibernian title of Metrical Meditations of a Cod when still in manuscript form. Spirits in Bondage is full of Yeatsian imagery and preoccupations. The publishers, William Heinemann in London, made Lewis drop certain poems from the final volume that they felt were “not on a level with the poet’s ‘best work’.”18 Lewis liked these “dropped” poems, and he and his brother preserved them among the Lewis family papers. They were eventually included in the collected edition of Lewis’s shorter poems edited by Walter Hooper after Lewis’s death (entitled simply Poems and published in 1986). Lewis himself dropped twenty-one poems from the original Metrical Meditations of a Cod manuscript before its publication as Spirits in Bondage. He thought he had completely destroyed these poems, but, in 2004, copies of them were found among Greeves’s papers by Lewis critic Don W. King. (Lewis had given a copy of the Cod manuscript to Greeves for safe keeping, in case he should die while serving in France during World War I; Lewis eventually took the manuscript back but, unbeknownst to Lewis, Greeves had copied out the poems himself in the meantime.) These “lost” poems were first published as part of an article by King on his monumental discovery in the journal Christianity and Literature.19 Had the poems dropped by Lewis or by his publisher been included in Spirits in Bondage, the book would have been even more Yeatsian (and indeed more Irish) than it already is.

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The two Yeats poems that seem to have had the biggest influence on the published version of Spirits in Bondage are “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “The Stolen Child.” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is evoked in three poems. Just as the narrator of Yeats’s poem dreams of an island in the middle of a lake possessed of a “bee-loud glade,” Lewis’s “Noon” is set by “a little lake [that] is smooth as glass,” where “the honey bee / Hums his drowsy melody / And wanders in his course a-straying / Through the sweet and tangled glade.”20 Likewise, just as Yeats’s narrator dreams of the rural West of Ireland while walking along “the pavements grey” in London, the eponymous character in Lewis’s “The Witch” misses the country place where “all is loved and all is known” as she “looks around with soft surprise / Upon the noisy, crowded square, / [and] The city oafs that nod and stare.”21 Similarly, the narrator of “Milton Read Again (in Surrey)” is, like the narrator of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” in England but missing Ireland.22 Three poems in Spirits in Bondage also betray the influence of Yeats’s “The Stolen Child.” Just as the faeries in Yeats’s poem tell the human child to “come away … to the waters and the wild” and boast of the dances that they do in the moonlight, in Lewis’s “Night,” “faerie voices”— which belong to faeries who are “dancing, dancing, under the moon”— implore their victim to “leave the world and come away!”23 In Yeats’s poem, the faeries ask the child to “wander hand in hand” with them through the countryside; similarly, in Lewis’s “The Ocean Strand,” the narrator says to his beloved: “Far, far away among the valleys green / Let us go forth and wander hand in hand.”24 And Lewis’s “The Star Bath” (as its title suggests) recalls the “pools among the rushes / That scarce could bathe a star” in Yeats’s poem.25 The influence of Yeats on the volume does not stop there, however. Below are images or phrases famously associated with Yeats that appear in at least two of the poems in Spirits in Bondage or its earlier incarnation as Metrical Meditations of a Cod, followed by the poems in which they appear: 1. Rosy—“Spooks,” “Apology,” “Ode for New Year’s Day,” and “Death In Battle”26 2. Shadowy—“Irish Nocturne,” “The Philosopher,” “Hesperus,” as well as four of the poems dropped from the collection: “Laus ­Mortis,” “My Western Garden,” “Yet More of the Wood Desolate,” and “Loneliness”27

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3. Faeries—“The Satyr,” “Victory,” “In Praise of Solid People,” “Song of the Pilgrims,” “Song,” “Ballade Mystique,” “Night,” “Hymn (For Boys’ Voices),” “‘Our Daily Bread’,” “World’s Desire,” and six of the dropped poems: “The Hills of Down,” “A Prelude,” “Couplets,” “Sonnet—To John Keats,” “Yet More of the Wood Desolate,” and “Loneliness”28 4. Twilight or twilit—“To Sleep” and “Hesperus,” as well as the dropped poem “My Western Gardens”29 5. Isle—“Ode for New Year’s Day” and “Song,” as well as the dropped poem “Yet More of the Wood Desolate”30 6. Strand—“Irish Nocturne” and “The Ocean Strand,” as well as four of the dropped poems: “My Western Garden,” “Anamnesis,” “Yet More of the Wood Desolate,” and “Sonnet (‘The clouds are red…’)”31 7. Mask—“To Sleep” and “The Ass”32 8. Tower—“The Philosopher,” “Lullaby,” and “World’s Desire”33 9. Hazel wood—“Night” and “How He Saw Angus the God”34 10. Heart’s desire or Heart’s delight—“Hesperus” and the original version of “Song”35 Lewis’s frequent recourse to these Yeatsian, Celtic Twilight images and words are a key sign of his devotion to Yeats, but so is Lewis’s decision to emulate the Nobel Prize winner’s penchant for putting characters from Irish sagas and myths into his poems. In Spirits in Bondage and Metrical Meditations of a Cod, Manannán, Cuchulain, The Morrigan, Iseult, Maeve, leprechauns, Angus, and the Children of Lir are all namechecked or clearly alluded to.36 Lewis’s inclusion of romantic evocations of the Irish landscape in his early poetry is another sign of Yeats’s influence. Two of the poems in Spirits in Bondage (“Irish Nocturne” and “The Roads”) and two of the dropped poems (“The Hills of Down” and “Couplets”) are specifically set in Ireland. Most of the rest of the poems take place in a landscape that, though unnamed, is strongly redolent of Irish countryside and coasts. It is a land with “valleys green,” “hill-tops green,” “haunted fens,” “mountain glens,” “heathery hills,” woods full of “hazel and tall pine / And youngling fir,” “soft streams,” and “open mountain heath / Yellow with gorse.”37 The land is peppered with “ruined shrines,” “a Druid stone,” and “ragged walls.”38 There are “mountains [that] rise above” and a “misty sea beneath” (specifically named as the “Atlantic”), crashing on “lonely

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beaches” in “the morning grey.”39 Sometimes there are “little winds” and sometimes a “driving Northern wind.”40 Lewis also picked up on Yeats’s idea of the West of Ireland as the land of heart’s desire. In glorifying the West, Yeats was longing for Sligo (where he was partially raised) as he resided in London or Dublin, and Lewis was perhaps longing for Donegal (a county he loved and visited throughout his life) as he resided in Belfast as a child or Oxford as an adult. Both were probably searching for what they saw as a more authentic Ireland. (Lewis once wrote that he preferred “the real Ireland of Patsy Macan [sic]” over “our protestant north.”)41 In Spirits in Bondage, the West is mentioned in three poems (“The Roads,” “Ode for New Year’s Day,” and “Death in Battle”) and is mentioned in four of the “dropped” poems (“Laus Mortis,” “My Western Garden,” “Yet More of the Wood Desolate,” and “The Hills of Down”).42 It should be noted, however, that in “The Hills of Down,” Lewis ultimately chooses “the long, low hills of Down” over “the yearning West.”43 In addition to agreeing with the Irish-American critic Charles A. Brady that Irish mythology (what he called the “the Tir-na’n-og element [sic]”) was a key influence on his work, Lewis pointed out to Brady that “much reading of the early Yeats” (both the poems and the plays) left a marked effect on his fiction, adding that the early Yeats was “worth twenty of the reconditioned 1920 model.”44 The only post-1920 work by Yeats that Lewis specifically praised was the classic 1938 play Purgatory, which Lewis said was really powerful: [a] conversation between a tramp and his son outside the ruins of a great house and then the ghost of its last mistress at the window, re-enacting her past life—she being the one who had finally let the whole thing down, marrying a horse-dealer … all the usual tragedy of the Irish aristocracy. Not quite true, of course, because probably most of the preceding generations had been pretty good wasters too: but an effective play.45

Lewis’s quarrel with the later Yeats was of course over the poet’s engagement with modernism—though Lewis did keep faith with his hero to the extent that he believed that Yeats was more adept at employing modernist techniques than just about anyone. In Lewis’s preface to a 1950 reissue of his narrative poem Dymer, he marvels at the fact that Yeats was able to “weather one of the bitterest literary revolutions we have known, embark

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on a second career, and as it were with one hand, play most of the moderns off the field at their own game.”46 As critics such as Ronald W. Bresland have noted, Lewis’s attacks on modernism were usually directed at T.S.  Eliot, with the most famous attack occurring in the opening lines of Lewis’s 1954 poem “Spartan Nactus” (also published under the title “A Confession”): I am so coarse, the things the poets see Are obstinately invisible to me. For twenty years I’ve stared my level best To see if evening—any evening—would suggest A patient etherised upon a table; In vain. I simply wasn’t able.47

Lewis also said of Eliot: “His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be a ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere but they are erroneous. … I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading The Waste Land, but that most men are by it infected with chaos.”48 While Eliot was Lewis’s main target, he would sometimes broaden the attack to also take in, as he said in a letter from May 1935, “the Parisian riff-raff of denationalised Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Europe her death wound.”49 He certainly included James Joyce among these “denationalised Irishmen,” and he may also have meant Samuel Beckett (if he was aware of Beckett’s work at this point). Beckett had been spending time in Paris and associating with Joyce since 1928, and, by the time of Lewis’s letter, had published Whoroscope (1930), More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and most of the poems from Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1935). Thanks to friends and relations back in Belfast, Lewis may also have become aware of Beckett from the Dubliner’s brief and comically unsuccessful stint as a teacher at Campbell College, Lewis’s Belfast alma mater, in 1928. It is interesting that Lewis should call these men “denationalised Irishmen.” Is this in fact what he himself feared becoming (or feared he had become) through long residence in England? Having read Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939)—as we know he did—and possibly More Pricks Than Kicks, Lewis must have been aware of how tied these books are to Dublin.50 Perhaps it was the “chaos” of modernism that made these works seem, to Lewis, unmoored from the Ireland that he knew growing up. The “denationalised” Irishness supposedly exemplified by Paris-based writers like Joyce and Beckett (as well as

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lesser-­known figures such as Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin) helped inspire Lewis to suggest to Oxford colleagues and pupils that they engage in a literary hoax in which they would cynically mimic the techniques of modernism and submit their work to T.S. Eliot at the Criterion under the guise of a fictional, incestuous brother and sister writing team called Bridget and Rollo Considine—the Irishness of this pair indicated by the Hibernian names Bridget and Considine and their “denationalised” status betrayed by the name “Rollo.”51 Lewis would not only have taken issue with the supposedly “denationalised” nature of Joyce and Beckett’s work; he also greatly disliked the modernist stream-of-consciousness technique famously employed by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses and by Beckett at various points in his career, including in his post-war Trilogy (1951–1953) and theatrical monologues. One of Lewis’s longest ruminations on literary modernism concerns the use of stream-of-consciousness in Joyce’s Ulysses and can be found in his book A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942). Lewis writes: The [recent] decline in Milton’s fame marks a stage in the rebellion of ‘civilization’ against civility. A much more respectable class of readers dislike it because they are in the grip of a particular kind of realism. Such people think that to organize elementary passions into sentiments is simply to tell lies about them. The mere stream of consciousness is for them the reality, and it is the special function of poetry to remove the elaborations of civility and get at ‘life’ in the raw. Hence (in part) the popularity of such a work as Ulysses. In my opinion this whole type of criticism is based on an error. The disorganized consciousness which it regards as specially real is in fact highly artificial. It is discovered by introspection—that is, by artificially suspending all the normal and outgoing activities of the mind and then attending to what is left. In that residuum it discovers no concentrated will, no logical thought, no morals, no stable sentiments, and (in a word) no mental hierarchy. Of course not; for we have deliberately stopped all these things in order to introspect … There may be a place for literature which tries to exhibit what we are doing when will and reason and attention and organized imagination are all off duty and sleep has not yet supervened. But I believe that if we regard such literature as specially realistic we are falling into illusion.52

These observations obviously betray what many critics have regarded as Lewis’s nineteenth-century sensibility, as well as his devotion to the Enlightenment’s privileging of human reason.

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Ultimately, it is a shame that Lewis could not appreciate the work of Joyce and Beckett since he shared so many of their preoccupations. Lewis, like Joyce in Ulysses, was fond of celebrating the bourgeoisie. Consider, for example, the Lewis poems “Genuine Article” (1964) and “In Praise of Solid People” (1919), as well as the short fiction work “Screwtape Proposes A Toast” (1959), in which the devil Screwtape asserts that “the Middle Class [is] … the social group which gave the humans the overwhelming majority of their scientists, physicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, composers, architects, jurists, and administrators. If there was a bunch of tall stalks that needed their tops knocked off, it was surely they.”53 Also, Lewis, like Joyce, felt torn between a narrow Irishness and cosmopolitanism. In a letter to Arthur Greeves from 1930, Lewis recounts a story about an Irish woman he met that echoes Gabriel Conroy’s run-in with Miss Ivors in Joyce’s story “The Dead” (1914): Miss Walsh … did not get through Phantastes [Lewis had lent her the 1858 George MacDonald novel after they both praised James Stephens’s 1912 novel The Crock of Gold] and I now strongly suspect her alleged love of fantasy was merely a bye-product [sic] of her fanatical love of everything Irish. This, wh. in any case cd. [sic] only be a respectable weakness took in her case the degraded form of endless chit-chat about all the famous Irish literary people she had met. She referred to Yeats as ‘W.B.’—‘for short’—until I asked her how four syllables could be a shortened form of one. The last five minutes of her, while I was seeing her off at the bus, led to the horrible discovery that I was learning Icelandic, and not learning Irish: for which I was soundly scolded.54

Lewis, as critics have pointed out, shared a similar background to Samuel Beckett (both spent their “painful childhoods in isolated Protestant suburban houses” in Ireland).55 Like Beckett in “Dante and the Lobster” (1934) and Endgame (1957), Lewis was interested in the theological reasons for divine punishment and the nature of human suffering, once writing a whole book on the subject, The Problem of Pain (1940). Lewis also shared Beckett’s view that sex was often comical and physically ludicrous. The sex scene between Macmann and his nurse Moll in the Beckett novel Malone Dies (1951) would certainly exemplify Lewis’s assertion in The Four Loves (1960) that lovers “feel an element not only of comedy … but even of buffoonery, in the body’s expression of Eros.”56 Finally, Lewis’s early belief in a cruelly indifferent God (see Spirits in Bondage) and the

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temporary return of that belief after the death of his wife (see A Grief Observed [1961]) mirror Beckett’s fear of an angry or indifferent God.57 One thinks of the voice in Not I (1972) laughing at the notion of a merciful God or Hamm in Endgame saying of God: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”58

Bernard Shaw The “Irish … gift” for “mischievous audacity” that Lewis detected in Yeats was also present in another Irish writer to whom Lewis was indebted: Bernard Shaw. Lewis had a love/hate relationship with Shaw’s writing. He credited “continual reading of Shaw” with making his politics “vaguely socialistic,” and throughout his life declared himself to strangers “an admirer of Bernard Shaw’s work.”59 He even said that one of Shaw’s early works, Love Among the Artists (written 1881, first published 1900), was “an excellent novel” with some “extraordinary characters in it,” which is more praise than many devoted Shavians would give it.60 Nevertheless, Lewis found that Shaw’s writing—while always “witty” and “interesting”—could also be “crude” and “silly.”61 It was Lewis’s Cork-born father who first directed him towards Shaw, telling him that, although Shaw was “a mountebank,” there were “laughs [to be had] in John Bull’s Other Island,” Shaw’s first Irish drama from 1904.62 In a play that Lewis wrote as a teenager, one sees the influence of Shaw (as A.N. Wilson has observed) in sentences such as the following: “Mr. Bar in evening dress is standing in the open drawing-room doorway, with his back to the stage. He is a stout, cheerful little fellow, who carries an atmosphere of impudence and unpaid-­ bills.”63 That Shavian touch, as we will see, remained a feature of Lewis’s work for the rest of his life. Lewis’s main engagement with Shaw related to Shaw’s conception of the Life Force. Lewis attacked it in several books (Perelandra, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man [1943], The Great Divorce, The Weight of Glory [1949], Mere Christianity [1952], and The Four Loves) and essays (“Dogma and the Universe” [1943], “The Grand Miracle” [1945], and “The Funeral of a Great Myth” [1967]), always mentioning Shaw by name, except in The Screwtape Letters. In that novel, the devil cannot remember the writer’s name but thinks it sounds like “Pshaw,” Lewis thus getting in a little dig.64 (There is another light-hearted insult of Shaw in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader [1952]: the Scrubb family are mocked for their Shavian obsessions, including the fact that they are

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“vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers” who wear “a special kind of underclothes” and who “always” leave their “windows … open.”)65 As John Aquino has shown, Shaw’s play cycle Back to Methuselah (1921)— which seeks to further illuminate his conception of the Life Force—is a key intertext in Lewis’s science fiction novels, as Lewis strenuously attempts to point out the flaws in Shaw’s theological system.66 Lewis greatly feared that more and more people would find Shaw’s theory of “Creative Evolution” a seductive alternative to Christianity, because it not only appealed to peoples’ spiritual natures but also to their aesthetic or literary sensibilities. Writing about “Life-Force-Worship” in the 1945 essay “Is Theology Poetry?,” Lewis asks: “Is it not one of the finest myths which human imagination has yet produced?”67 He then proceeds to retell that “myth,” and he begins by comparing the theory’s account of biological history to a play, with “Life” as its main character: “Everything seems to be against the infant hero of our drama—just as everything seems against the youngest son or ill-used stepdaughter at the opening of a fairy-tale.”68 Life struggles to “complicate … itself: from the amoeba up to … the mammal,” and does so successfully.69 With the appearance of humans, Lewis writes that we have returned to “the theme of the younger son and the ugly duckling once more,” as early Homo sapiens battle against a hostile world and yet “thrive.”70 This is followed by: the Cave Man with his club and his flints, muttering and growling over his enemies’ bones, dragging his screaming mate by her hair (I could never quite make out why), tearing his children to pieces in fierce jealousy till one of them is old enough to tear him, cowering before the terrible gods whom he has created in his own image. But these are only growing pains.71

Thanks to science, humankind learns to master nature and to abandon religious “superstitions.”72 Eventually, earth sees the rise of the Superman: “a race of demigods now rule the planet … for eugenics have made certain that only demigods will be born, and psycho-analysis that none of them shall lose or smirch his divinity, and communism that all which divinity requires shall be ready to their hands. Man has ascended his throne.”73 Lewis contends that “if the myth stopped at that point, it might be a little pathetic. It would lack the highest grandeur of which human imagination is capable.”74 Instead, it concludes with what Lewis calls the “final stroke of genius”: “Nature, the old enemy,” has its revenge, with the

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cooling of the sun ensuring that all life is destroyed forever.75 Reemphasising the theatrical nature of the account, Lewis finishes by writing: The pattern of the myth … is the pattern of many Elizabethan tragedies, where the protagonist’s career can be represented by a slowly ascending and then rapidly falling curve, with its highest point in Act IV.  You see him climbing up and up, then blazing in his bright meridian, then finally overwhelmed in ruin. Such a world-drama appeals to every part of us.76

While Lewis may denounce Shaw in this extended passage, he also reveals one of the main ways in which Shaw influenced him: Lewis learned from Shaw how to use humour and ruthless scrutiny to explode popularly held beliefs. In this particular instance, Lewis’s reduction of the Life Force version of biological history to an absurd, improbable cartoon saga is strongly reminiscent of Shaw’s use of humour mixed with incisive observation to lampoon prevailing religious and political orthodoxies. And, in Lewis’s theological essays, he frequently emulates Shaw’s practice of building up such a reasonable argument in defence of a point that it seems absurd to disagree. It could be justly argued that Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, Miracles (1947), and numerous essays by Lewis might not exist in their present form if Shaw’s prefaces to spiritual plays like Saint Joan (1923), Androcles and the Lion (1912), and the Back to Methuselah cycle had never been written. Critics such as Humphrey Carpenter label Lewis’s debating style in these religious books and essays “Chestertonian.”77 It is true that Lewis was influenced by G.K.  Chesterton’s apologetical works, especially The Everlasting Man (1925) and Orthodoxy (1908); however, Lewis’s Irish Anglican perspective and his use of paradoxes, humour, and clever epigrams to combat widely accepted views arguably make his spiritual treatises more “Shavian” than “Chestertonian,” as Joseph Pearce has previously (if tentatively) suggested.78 Indeed, a close reading of Lewis’s work proves that Shaw did not just influence the manner in which Lewis wrote but also literally what he wrote: on numerous occasions, Lewis borrows ideas and phrases that he has picked up from Shaw (almost always without citing his source). Indeed, there are prominent examples of Lewis borrowing from several Shaw works, including John Bull’s Other Island (1904), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), Getting Married (1908), Fanny’s First Play (1911), and Man and Superman (1903).

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Lewis once wrote, “A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion.”79 This idea comes from two famous comments in the preface to Shaw’s major Irish play, John Bull’s Other Island, in which the playwright states that “a conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else” and “a healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”80 The narrator of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength tells us that the Irish character Captain O’Hara has an accent that “English people [call] a Southern Irish brogue and Irish people, ‘a Dublin accent you could cut with a knife.’”81 As Lewis’s narrator implies, this was a common Irish expression in the early- to mid-twentieth century. However, it also curiously echoes a line in John Bull’s Other Island. In that play, the Irishman Larry Doyle mocks his English business partner, Tom Broadbent, for his lack of knowledge of Ireland and the Irish, noting: “Ive heard you call a Dublin accent you could hang your hat on, a brogue.”82 In the poem “Irish Nocturne” (1919), Lewis draws a parallel between the foggy Irish climate and the Irish inability to stop dreaming and start doing. He suggests that “the fog and the cloud” which resides in the “heart[s] and head[s]” of Irish people has a tendency to make them “dim and dreamy,” with the result that they forget all their “boasts.”83 Lewis concludes the poem by claiming that the island’s “colourless skies / And … blurred horizons breed / Lonely desire and many words and brooding and never a deed.”84 This parallel had already been made years earlier in John Bull’s Other Island in Larry Doyle’s famous speech to the Englishman Broadbent about Ireland: Your wits can’t thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. Youve no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heartscalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! [Savagely] No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman’s imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can’t face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and

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[bitterly, at Broadbent] be ‘agreeable to strangers,’ like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.85

Lewis also shows that he is familiar with Doyle’s speech in a 1954 essay claiming Edmund Spenser for Ireland (Spenser was, of course, born in England but spent much of his adult life in Co. Cork). Lewis writes: There is a real affinity between [Spenser’s] Faerie Queen, a poem of quests and wanderings and inextinguishable desires, and Ireland itself—the soft, wet air, the loneliness, the muffled shapes of the hills, the heart-rending sunsets. It was of course a different Ireland from ours, an Ireland without potatoes, whitewashed cottages or bottled stout: but it must already have been ‘the land of longing.’86

In the continuation of this passage about Spenser and Ireland, Lewis goes on to echo another idea from John Bull’s Other Island: the notion that “the Irish climate … will stamp an immigrant more deeply and durably in two years … than the English climate will in two hundred,” thereby quickly turning new arrivals into Irish people.87 Lewis writes: The Faerie Queen should perhaps be regarded as the work of one who is turning into an Irishman. For Ireland shares with China the power of assimilating all her invaders. It is an old complaint that all who go there—Danes, Normans, English, Scotch, very Firbolgs—rapidly become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’. With Spenser the process was perhaps beginning. It is true he hated the Irish and they him: but, as an Irishman myself, I take leave to doubt whether that is a very un-Irish trait. (‘The Irish, sir’, said Dr. Johnson, ‘are an honest people. They never speak well of one another.’)88

If this were not proof enough of Lewis’s debts to Shaw’s play, he quotes directly from Larry Doyle’s speech in his section on Spenser in his 1954 critical study English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama. And he introduces the quote by saying “what Ireland can do to some minds we learn from Bernard Shaw.”89 Lewis did not just learn more about Ireland from Shaw. Lewis’s views in an essay on vivisection draw heavily on Shaw’s views on the same subject, as expressed in the preface to the 1906 play The Doctor’s Dilemma. Lewis and Shaw both quote Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson on the subject, and they both criticise the Roman Catholic idea that animals have no souls “so that you cannot sin against an animal.”90 Each writer also expresses

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fear over the fact that the justifications for vivisection could easily be used to justify experimenting on humans who the powers-that-be decide are “inferior.”91 Despite the fact that Lewis, in the essay, does not credit Shaw with providing him with key parts of his argument, he does acknowledge in a letter that his views on vivisection were heavily influenced by the preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma.92 In Shaw’s preface to his 1908 play Getting Married, there is a section entitled “Home Manners are Bad Manners,” in which he writes that some people conceive marriage as a dispensation from all the common civilities and delicacies which they have to observe among strangers, or, as they put it, ‘before company.’ … If such people took their domestic manners into general society, they would very soon find themselves without a friend or even an acquaintance in the world.93

The sentiments in this section of Shaw’s preface are strongly echoed and expanded upon in Lewis’s classic 1945 essay “The Sermon and the Lunch” (in which he namechecks Shaw as a key figure in “anti-domestic literature”) and in an important section of The Four Loves (in which he copies Shaw in specifically discussing “Company Manners”).94 During his World War II-era BBC radio talks on Christianity, Lewis referred to one pantheistic doctrine as “damned nonsense.” In a footnote to this passage in the published version of the talks, Mere Christianity, Lewis writes: “One listener complained of the word damned as frivolous swearing. But I mean exactly what I say—nonsense that is damned is under God’s curse, and will (apart from God’s grace) lead those who believe it to eternal death.”95 This echoes an exchange in Shaw’s 1911 hit drama, Fanny’s First Play, in which the young female lead Margaret Knox (who has had a politico-spiritual conversion) explains her new perspective to her more orthodoxly pious mother: MARGARET. It’s no use, mother. I dont care for you and Papa any the less; but I shall never get back to the old way of talking again. Ive made a sort of descent into hell— MRS KNOX. Margaret! Such a word! MARGARET. … [W]hen I said that about a descent into hell I was not swearing. I was in earnest, like a preacher.96

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In both of these cases, Lewis and Shaw justify the sincere use of a word ordinarily used as a casual, blasphemous swear. Lewis once wrote, regarding literary style: “Try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work’s sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.”97 This statement was obviously influenced by Shaw’s notion, from the preface to the 1903 play Man and Superman, that “effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him.”98 This was not the only influence that Man and Superman had on him. While Lewis felt that the “Don Juan in Hell” segment of the play was weak when performed on a stage, it still seems to have left its mark on his fiction.99 In Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, as in the “Don Juan in Hell” scene, a devil is talking, explaining his ways and laughing at mankind’s follies. Also, in “Don Juan in Hell” and in Lewis’s The Great Divorce, people are trying to figure out why they were damned, and both Shaw and Lewis state that hell is self-chosen (the damned in both works can cross over to heaven if they like) and that Hell is the home of pomp and sentimentality. All of these conscious and unconscious borrowings from Shaw demonstrate how much Lewis was influenced by the great Dublin playwright. Lewis’s frequent and high-profile criticisms of Shaw were undoubtedly inspired by the threat posed to Christianity by Shaw’s “Life-Force-­ Worship.” However, they also arguably betray what Harold Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence”—that is, the tendency among writers to disown, disparage, or deliberately misinterpret the work of predecessors that they feel have had too big an influence on them.100

James Stephens In addition to Yeats and Shaw, a third Irish writer who had a significant influence on Lewis was the Dublin-born James Stephens, through his aforementioned novel The Crock of Gold. For many years, Lewis said that it was perhaps his favourite novel. (He could not decide between it and Phantastes by the Scottish author George MacDonald.)101 The Crock of Gold, which Lewis re-read repeatedly throughout his life, had a profound impact on his writings and thought. He wrote poems about two of the book’s characters, Angus (“How He Saw Angus the God” from 1919)

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and Pan (“Pan’s Purge” from 1947).102 He used the story’s “permanent twilight” for the underworld in The Great Divorce.103 The devils tormenting their charges in The Screwtape Letters is very reminiscent of the leprechauns, fairies, and Pan afflicting humans in The Crock of Gold. Caitlin’s Happiness in The Crock of Gold feels to her like “despondency” and is described as “tenuous” and “aloof,” recalling Lewis’s bittersweet and elusive feelings of Joy in Surprised By Joy.104 The novel, which mixes Irish and Greek mythological figures, recalls Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, with its “hodge podge” of supernatural figures drawn from a disparate array of mythological and literary sources (for example, Lewis’s inclusion of Father Christmas alongside creatures more commonly found in classical or national mythologies and works of medieval romance).105 Lewis’s fiction is also similar to The Crock of Gold in that it is fantasy pregnant with philosophy and theology. And Stephen’s theological musings even parallel Lewis’s own views on occasion. For example, The Crock of Gold’s celebration of “free will” (“The free-will of mankind [is] the most jealously guarded and holy principle in life; therefore, the interference of the loving gods comes only on an equally loving summons.”) strongly echoes Lewis’s own feelings on God and free will as expressed in books like The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and The Problem of Pain (“[God] cannot ravish. He can only woo.”).106 That said, it should be noted that, in later life, Lewis decided that the long transcendental and philosophical passages in The Crock of Gold that he had found “mysterious” as a younger man were in fact just “bad”—that is, bad theology and badly written.107 Nonetheless, Lewis still regarded James Stephens’s work very highly: in addition to The Crock of Gold, he also loved Here Are Ladies (1913), The Demi-Gods (1919), and the “unmistakably great and almost perfect” Deirdre (1923).108 He went so far as to vow that if anyone ever described Stephens as “only a period talent, I [would] fight on that issue as long as there is a drop of ink in my pen.”109

Jonathan Swift An Irish writer who may have had as great (or perhaps even a greater) influence on Lewis than Yeats, Shaw, and Stephens was Jonathan Swift, who Lewis once referred to with familiarity and affection as “the late ingenious Dean.”110 Swift was an influence on Lewis almost from birth: there was an unabridged, “lavishly illustrated edition” of Gulliver’s Travels

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(1726) in Lewis’s nursery in his childhood home in Belfast.111 Because of the novel’s profound, formative influence on Lewis, he repeatedly used Gulliver’s Travels as a touchstone when discussing literature in his critical essays and his personal letters.112 However, Gulliver’s Travels did not just leave its mark on Lewis’s literary criticism; it also left an obvious imprint on his creative work. He wrote a poem (suggested to him by a Giorgio de Chirico painting) about the decline of humankind and the dawn of “a Houyhnhnms’ Land,” populated by enlightened horses.113 There are talking horses in Lewis’s 1954 novel, The Horse and His Boy (including one called Hwin—similar in sound to Swift’s “Houyhnhnms”). Also, just as Swift plays games with the relative sizes of characters in Gulliver’s Travels, the ghosts in Hell are tiny and the spirits in Heaven are huge in Lewis’s The Great Divorce. And Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Till We Have Faces (1956), and The Cosmic Trilogy (1938–1945) all echo Gulliver’s Travels in being works that deftly blend fantasy and socio-political philosophy. From an Irish Studies point of view, there are two especially noteworthy aspects of Lewis’s appreciation of Gulliver’s Travels. The first relates to the fact that Lewis, after re-reading Gulliver’s Travels in 1923, noted in his diary that “it does not give me the horrors which the critics say it ought to—I fancy because it overshoots the mark. We know things aren’t so bad as all that.”114 Similarly, Lewis wrote in an essay that Swift’s “love of filth is, in my opinion, much better understood by schoolboys than by psychoanalysts.”115 Is it possible that an Irish sensibility made the book easier for Lewis to swallow than for horrified English readers like George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and D.H. Lawrence?116 The second Irish aspect of Lewis’s appreciation of Swift’s novel is the fact that he clearly approved of the anti-colonial message in Gulliver’s Travels. Lewis once wrote, in the context of Ireland, that “conquest is an evil productive of almost every other evil both to those who commit and to those who suffer it,” and stated in his autobiography that he “hated whatever [he] knew or imagined of the British Empire.”117 Likewise, as Nicole duPlessis has demonstrated, “most of the novels in The Chronicles of Narnia (1950–1956) involve a people being taken over—or nearly taken over—to their detriment by imperialistic invaders or supernatural beings.”118 (This is also the plot of all three novels in Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy.) Therefore, Lewis would certainly have applauded Swift’s demonstration in Gulliver’s Travels that the English are just as corrupt (or even

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more corrupt) than the creatures in the strange lands that Gulliver visits, and are therefore in no position to do any “civilising.” Further to this last point, Swift’s anti-colonial messages in Gulliver’s Travels—like Lewis’s in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Cosmic Trilogy— are clearly underpinned by their mutual belief that no portion of humanity is more righteous than any other. And this betrays one of the main similarities between the two writers: that is, that they were both practising Christians. Lewis certainly recognised this as one of the main reasons for his attraction to Swift’s work. In 1940, he praised a new book by Robert Wyse Jackson of Trinity College Dublin called Jonathan Swift, Dean and Pastor for re-emphasising the fact that, in addition to being a writer, Swift was also (whatever his private scepticisms) a Christian minister who cared for his congregation and his community in very concrete and spiritually inspired ways. Lewis called the book “important” and stated that “it answers [Samuel] Johnson’s taunt about ‘turned richman for life’ by pointing out that most persons of the period wd. [sic] simply have lived at Bath and drawn the decanal stipend.”119 There is one very clear way in which the Christian nature of Gulliver’s Travels left its mark on Lewis’s writings. In Swift’s novel, the Houyhnhnms in Book Four have not yet fallen from God’s grace. They do not know how to lie; they are not ashamed of being naked; they do not engage in war; they have no need of money or lawyers or artificial stimulants; they know no disease; and they share all of their resources equally with one another. Lewis seems to have loved this idea of a fallen person visiting a prelapsarian world, since he borrows it for the novels Perelandra, in which the inhabitants of Venus are depicted as still unspoiled by sin, and The Magician’s Nephew (1955), in which the newly created world of Narnia is—until the arrival of Jadis—free from sin. In addition to Gulliver’s Travels, another book by Swift that influenced Lewis was The Battle of the Books. Although Lewis did not particularly enjoy the book (“very good in its way, but not much in my line”), it left a significant mark on him.120 It helped soften him up regarding what he called his “‘chronological snobbery,’ the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”121 It was ultimately Owen Barfield who completely destroyed this habit of mind in Lewis. Being freed from it led Lewis to champion the reading of works from many different eras in The Weight of Glory, The Screwtape Letters, The World’s Last Night (1960), and, of course, the essay “On the Reading of

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Old Books” (1944).122 As Lewis puts it so succinctly in the essay “Learning In War-Time” (1939): A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.123

Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke The championing of old books over the contemporary press smacks of what Declan Kiberd has called “nostalgia as protest,” and Lewis was a big fan not only of Swift but also of two other Irish practitioners of “nostalgia as protest”: the eighteenth-century writers Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke.124 Lewis was fond of quoting from Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” (1770), and two of Lewis’s own poems—“The Future of Forestry” (1938) and “Lines During a General Election” (1964), both protests against the destruction of the English countryside—are strongly reminiscent of Goldsmith’s classic poem.125 Lewis also admired Goldsmith’s perennially popular novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), quoting from it in Surprised By Joy and referring to it fondly in his letters.126 Finally, Lewis probably named the scheming head of the secret police in That Hideous Strength Miss Hardcastle after the Goldsmith character of the same name whose “contrivances” enable her to accomplish her goals in the classic comedy She Stoops to Conquer (1773).127 Lewis—as a medievalist and a Christian—greatly admired Edmund Burke’s politics of chivalry and honour. Lewis quoted from or paid tribute to Burke’s writings on this subject on various occasions, and even wrote an entire essay on “The Necessity of Chivalry” which draws not only on his medieval studies but also on Burke.128 (One might also note that Reepicheep in The Chronicles of Narnia is intended by Lewis as the very embodiment of chivalry, with his curious mix of “ferocity and meekness.”)129 Burke’s views on the futility of violent revolution and rapid social change, as articulated in his seminal 1790 treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France, are a strong and obvious influence on the Lewis essays “Delinquents in the Snow” (1957) and “A Reply to Professor Haldane” (1955). In “Delinquents in the Snow,” Lewis decides: “Revolutions seldom cure the evil against which they are directed; they

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always beget a hundred others. Often they perpetuate the old evil under a new name.”130 And in “A Reply to Professor Haldane,” Lewis concludes, with pure Burkean melodrama: Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. … I must, of course, admit that the actual state of affairs may sometimes be so bad that a man is tempted to risk change even by revolutionary methods; to say that desperate diseases require desperate remedies and that necessity knows no law. But to yield to temptation is, I think, fatal. It is under that pretext that every abomination enters. Hitler, the Machiavellian Prince, the Inquisition, the Witch Doctor, all claimed to be necessary.131

Lewis greatly admired Burke as a prose writer as well. He once defended his right to end a sentence with a preposition on the grounds that “The Authorised Version and E. Burke thought a preposition a very good word to end with. So there!”132 Burke’s influence can also possibly be seen in Lewis’s decision to name a character in The Chronicles of Narnia Edmund. That character has torn loyalties in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), as he is temporarily unsure whether to side with Aslan or the White Witch. In choosing to name the boy Edmund, Lewis was clearly alluding to two other Edmunds with conflicted loyalties: Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606) and Edmund Spenser, the English writer who loved the Irish landscape and aspects of Irish culture but who still advocated a “scorched-­ earth” policy with regard to the Irish populace and who wanted to see the Irish language obliterated. However, Lewis may also have been thinking of Edmund Burke: the Irish politician was somewhat torn between his loyalty to the “little platoon” within which he was raised (Ireland) and the country where he served as a politician for decades (England).133 Burke even went so far as to pose as “an Englishman” in his greatest work, the aforementioned Reflections on the Revolution in France—something which offended English commentators such as Mary Wollstonecraft who could not consider the politician anything but Irish.134 Burke’s divided loyalties led his biographer Conor Cruise O’Brien to suggest the existence within the one man of the “English” Burke and the “Irish” Burke.135

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Oscar Wilde In addition to the writers already named, there are other important Irish authors whom Lewis respected and to whom he was significantly indebted. Lewis—like Shaw—was put off by anything that smacked of “art for art’s sake,” but he still loved various works by the Dublin-born aesthete Oscar Wilde.136 He felt that De Profundis (1905) had “considerable beauties,” and loved “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898) even more (because he felt it ultimately had more sincerity and less “artificiality” than De Profundis).137 Most of all, he loved Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), once writing, “The beauty of it is that it entirely rejects probability or sentiment—would that all our society farces did the same— and gives itself up to a sort of glittering and classic nonsense that reminds me strongly of ‘Alice In Wonderland.’”138 As I have noted elsewhere, Wilde’s comical satirising of the English in comedies such as Earnest was emulated by Lewis in The Screwtape Letters, “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” and The Chronicles of Narnia.139 This links Lewis not just to Wilde but to the entire line of English-based, Irish Anglican writers from George Farquhar onwards (including the aforementioned Swift and Shaw) who regarded the English with a critical, outsider’s eye. Finally, Lewis’s reading of Wilde may have given him the idea for the permanent winter in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is a feature of the Wilde story “The Selfish Giant” (1888). That said, as Ward has shown, the fact that the novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is aligned with the images and ideas traditionally associated with Jupiter means that this plot point is also related to the Jovial theme of “desires fulfilled and winter overgone” (as Lewis puts it when writing about poetry written “under festal Jove” in his critical study The Allegory of Love).140

Laurence Sterne and George Berkeley The “glittering and classic nonsense” of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is also a feature of another book by an Irish writer that Lewis loved, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), by Tipperary-born Laurence Sterne.141 Lewis was initially put off by the “scrappiness” and the “abundant coarseness” of the book, but he later grew to love it.142 Indeed, he dipped into what he called “the maddest book ever written” repeatedly throughout his adult life.143 Lewis especially loved the comedy that Sterne generated by bringing together “an ideally

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inappropriate conjunction of minds.”144 He often compared conversations in his own life or those that he heard about to the maddening conversations between Tristram’s father and Uncle Toby.145 That said, he was also aware of the “beautiful serious parts in” the novel.146 And, once again, it is a case of Lewis being influenced by a work from the pen of an Irish Anglican which combines the fantastical (or “nonsensical”) with philosophy and theology. A final Irish author who had a profound effect on Lewis was, like Sterne, another Anglican clergyman: the Kilkenny-born philosopher and bishop George Berkeley. Berkeley, as we learn in Surprised By Joy, had a big role in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.147 Lewis was inspired by Berkeley’s Irish idealism, and firmly believed to the end of his life that Berkeley’s proof of the existence of God in Three Dialogues (1713) was logically sound and “unanswerable.”148

Conclusion While this chapter has covered the Irish writers who left the biggest imprint on Lewis’s worldview and writings, it should be noted that there were additional writers from Lewis’s native country who significantly influenced specific Lewis works. For example, Marijane Osborn has shown that Lewis drew on the 1935 science fiction novel Land Under England by the Tuam-born novelist Joseph O’Neill when writing both Perelandra and The Silver Chair (1953).149 Mervyn Nicholson has demonstrated that Dubliner Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) was a key influence on Lewis’s science-fiction trilogy—primarily That Hideous Strength but also, to a lesser extent, Perelandra.150 And Edward Power has argued that the fantasy worlds of Meath novelist Lord Dunsany influenced the creation of Lewis’s Narnia.151 What’s more, critics have noted that Lewis’s work can be fruitfully compared (in terms of philosophical, socio-political, and literary preoccupations) to that of his contemporaries from Northern Ireland, such as Louis MacNeice, Helen Waddell, and Forrest Reid—all of whom Lewis knew personally and admired to a greater or lesser extent.152 Adding all of these figures to those profiled earlier in this chapter makes even clearer how wrong critics have been to ignore or quickly gloss over Lewis’s profound debts and links to Irish literature. Sceptics regarding Lewis’s Irishness will point out (justly) that this chapter affirms that Lewis was primarily shaped by writers from his own Irish Anglican background—a background, which, of course, carries with it a significant degree of cultural Britishness.153 However, as regards Irish

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literature, Lewis was not exclusively interested in the mainstream, often English-set works by canonical Irish Anglican figures which are often included in anthologies and syllabi devoted to “English” or “British” literature—works that an English writer (or, indeed, one from Scotland or Wales) might also take inspiration from. As we have seen, Lewis had a keen interest in thoroughly Irish works—even relatively obscure ones—by W.B. Yeats, James Stephens, and Bernard Shaw (not just Shaw’s major Irish play John Bull’s Other Island and the partially Irish-set Back to Methuselah, but also his “English” plays featuring Irish characters, such as Man and Superman, The Doctor’s Dilemma, and Fanny’s First Play). With regard specifically to Yeats, Lewis was bewildered by the indifference shown to the poet’s work by most of his English acquaintances and wrote: “[P]erhaps his appeal is purely Irish—if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish.”154 What’s more, Lewis was also exercised and/or inspired by the work of Irish Catholics: not just the two examples noted earlier, James Joyce and Joseph O’Neill, but also figures such as George Moore and Joseph Mary Plunkett.155 And, as previously mentioned, Lewis applauded the work of his Ulster Presbyterian contemporaries Forrest Reid and Helen Waddell. Given Lewis’s Irish/British hybridity, as well as his diverse Irish literary influences and interests, it is not surprising that his oeuvre features some works in which the Irishness is completely overt—such as “Irish Nocturne,” “The Hills of Down,” and his unfinished “Ulster novel” (written c. 1924–1927)156—and others in which it is present in a more occluded form. I refer, of course, to the works in which he satirises the English (see, for example, his portraits of Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew or the temptee’s mother in The Screwtape Letters), implicitly critiques British colonialism (the harsh light cast on “invaders” in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Cosmic Trilogy), or subtly alludes to Ireland and Irish literature (as in numerous works discussed in this chapter). These often-ignored aspects of Lewis’s work reflect his proud Irish identity and—in certain cases—also arguably betray signs of the “anti-Englishness” traceable from Lewis’s youth that he thought (hoped?) he had eventually outgrown.157

Notes 1. As quoted in Bresland, Backward Glance, 116. For several other instances of Lewis self-identifying as Irish, see Clare, “C.S. Lewis: An Irish Writer.” 2. Bresland, Backward Glance, 30–31, 42, 51, 58–64, 68, 76–77, 84, 88, 98–103; Bleakley, C.S. Lewis: At Home in Ireland, 77–81; Martin, ed.,

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Reading the Classics with C.S.  Lewis, 187–188, 191–192, 194–196, 199–200, 246–249; Jebb, Writing God and the Self; McGrath, C.S. Lewis, 12, 107, 134. Sandy Smith’s C.S. Lewis and the Island of His Birth is primarily concerned with the author’s biographical and familial links to Ireland; that said, he does briefly mention Lewis’s interest in the work of Jonathan Swift and Forrest Reid. (See Smith, C.S. Lewis and the Island of His Birth, 29; 149.) Swift and Reid are both discussed later in this chapter. For an overview of the “over three hundred books” written about Lewis, see Pavlac Glyer and Bratman, “C.S. Lewis Scholarship.” 3. See Lewis, “A Note on Jane Austen”; Lewis, “The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard.” 4. Ward, Planet Narnia. 5. Further to Lewis’s Britishness, it should be noted here that he also greatly admired the Scottish writers George MacDonald, Kenneth Grahame, R.L. Stevenson, James Boswell, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Henryson, and the Welsh metaphysical poets George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Also, although both of his parents were born in Cork, Lewis was proud of his paternal Welsh forebears. His great-­ grandparents were Welsh ­farmers; their son emigrated to Cork, and he eventually worked his way up from “workman” to partner in a Belfast shipbuilding firm, Macilwaine and Lewis. (Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 3.) 6. Ibid., 24. 7. Wilson, C.S. Lewis, 22. 8. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 59. 9. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 174. 10. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 150. 11. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 645. 12. Lewis, Preface to Dymer, 147. 13. Brown, Ireland’s Literature, 160. 14. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 524; 531. 15. Ibid., 532; 530; 530; 530. 16. Ibid., 565. 17. Lewis, Perelandra, 10. 18. Hooper, Introduction to Poems, xii. 19. King, “Lost but Found.” These poems—and the ones that Heinemann dropped from Spirits in Bondage—were later reprinted in King’s 2015 critical edition of Lewis’s poetry (the source I will be citing in this chapter for quotes from Lewis’s verse). 20. Yeats, The Poems, 35; Lewis, Collected Poems, 92. 21. Yeats, The Poems, 35; Lewis, Collected Poems, 88. 22. Lewis, Collected Poems, 93. 23. Yeats, The Poems, 16; Lewis, Collected Poems, 105–106. 24. Yeats, The Poems, 16; Lewis, Collected Poems, 91.

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25. Yeats, The Poems, 17. 26. Lewis, Collected Poems, 79; 80; 82; 116. 27. Ibid., 78; 91; 111; 59; 43; 56; 61. 28. Ibid., 76; 77; 99; 101; 102; 105; 105–106; 107; 108; 115; 45; 51–52; 66; 54; 55; 61. 29. Ibid., 83; 111; 43. 30. Ibid., 81; 102; 55. 31. Ibid., 78; 91; 43; 51; 54; 60. 32. Ibid., 84; 103. 33. Ibid., 90; 114; 115. 34. Ibid., 105; 109. 35. Lewis, Collected Poems, 112; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 373. 36. For direct references to these legendary and mythological figures, see Lewis, Collected Poems, 54, 60, 77, 80, 95, 109. For an additional allusion to Manannán, see the reference to his kingdom, the “Countryunder-wave.” (Ibid., 106.) For an additional allusion to Cuchulain, see “dare the glorious leap” (Ibid., 97)—presumably a reference to his Salmon Leap on the Isle of Skye. (That said, this could be an allusion to Fionn mac Cumhaill’s famous leap from the summit of the Hill of Allen.) For the Children of Lir, see the reference to the “three white swans” in Ibid., 114. 37. Ibid., 91; 83; 95; 95; 103; 109; 83; 109. 38. Ibid., 88; 87; 91. 39. Ibid., 115; 109; 90; 90; 103. 40. Ibid., 83; 115. 41. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 330. Patsy MacCann is a character in James Stephens’s The Demi-Gods (1919). 42. Lewis, Collected Poems, 111; 82; 116; 59; 43; 56; 45. 43. Ibid., 45. 44. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 630. The early Yeats continued to be an influence on his post-Spirits in Bondage poetry. For example, in “an unfinished autobiographical poem … written shortly after his conversion to Christianity in 1931,” he alludes to Yeats’s “No Second Troy.” (Reyes, Introduction to C.S Lewis’s Lost Aeneid, 7. For the poem, see Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 77.) 45. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 302–303. 46. Lewis, Preface to Dymer, 147. 47. Lewis, Collected Poems, 388. See also Bresland, Backward Glance, 96–97. 48. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 163. 49. Ibid., 164. 50. For evidence that Lewis read these two Joyce novels, see Green and Hooper, C.S. Lewis, 368; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1440.

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51. For more on this, see Carpenter, The Inklings, 21. 52. Lewis, Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, 131–132. 53. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 126. Lewis also once claimed that “most great English writers” were “member[s] of the middle class.” (Lewis, “Edmund Spenser, 1552–1599,” 121.) 54. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 937. 55. Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, 160. See also Brown, “Louis MacNeice’s Ireland,” 81. 56. Lewis, Four Loves, 101. 57. For more on Lewis believing in such a God, see Hooper, Introduction to Poems, xii; Lewis, Grief Observed, 7–8. 58. Beckett, Endgame, 55. For more connections between the work of Lewis and Beckett, see Jebb, Writing God and the Self. 59. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 173; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 65. 60. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 190. 61. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 35; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 190; Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 62; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 286. 62. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 102. 63. Wilson, C.S. Lewis, 17. 64. Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 84. 65. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 7. 66. Aquino, “Shaw and C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy.” 67. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” Essay Collection, 13–14. 68. Ibid., 13. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid., 13–14. 72. Ibid., 14. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid. 77. Carpenter, The Inklings, 217–222. 78. Pearce, C.S. Lewis and the Catholic Church, 6–8. 79. Lewis, “Membership,” 334. 80. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 30; 31. 81. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 121. 82. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 78. As the word “Ive” in this quotation demonstrates, Shaw always omitted apostrophes from contractions, except where it would cause confusion, e.g. “can’t” versus “cant.” 83. Lewis, Collected Poems, 78. 84. Ibid.

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85. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 81. 86. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser,” 126. 87. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island, 11. 88. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser,” 126. The actual quote from Dr. Johnson is “the Irish are a fair people” (emphasis mine). See Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 199. 89. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, 356. 90. Shaw, Doctor’s Dilemma, 52. See also Lewis, “Vivisection,” 694. 91. Lewis, “Vivisection,” 696. See also Shaw, Doctor’s Dilemma, 53. 92. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 65. 93. Shaw, Getting Married / Press Cuttings, 65. 94. Lewis, “The Sermon and the Lunch”; Lewis, Four Loves, 42–45. 95. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 45. 96. Shaw, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet / Fanny’s First Play, 145. An additional possible indication of Shaw’s influence on Lewis relates to the other play in this volume—The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet. Lewis uses Shaw’s unusual (archaic) spelling “shew” instead of “show” in Arms and the Exile, his unfinished translation of Virgil’s The Aeneid. (Lewis, C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, 153.) The title of Lewis’s translation comes, like the title of Shaw’s Arms and the Man (1892), from the first line of The Aeneid—or, at least, from the first line that we know was by Virgil. (There are four introductory lines that did not appear in manuscripts until the ninth century.) 97. Lewis, “Membership,” 340. 98. Shaw, Man and Superman, 35. 99. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1088. 100. See Bloom, Anxiety of Influence. 101. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 281, 293. 102. Other Lewis poems which arguably touch upon characters from Stephens’s The Crock of Gold include “The Philosopher,” “The Ass,” and “The Autumn Morning” (which, as noted above, mentions leprechauns). 103. Stephens, Crock of Gold, 11. 104. Stephens, Crock of Gold, 83. 105. For a summary of the commentators (including J.R.R. Tolkein) who view The Chronicles of Narnia as an unsatisfactory “hodge podge,” because they draw on an array of mythological and literary sources, see Ward, Planet Narnia, 8–9. 106. Stephens, Crock of Gold, 166; Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 41. 107. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 859; Lewis, “Period Criticism,” 488. 108. Lewis, “Period Criticism,” 490. 109. Ibid., 488.

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110. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 1569. 111. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 14. 112. Lewis, “On Science Fiction,” 454, 457; Lewis, “On Juvenile Tastes,” 476; Lewis, “Hamlet,” 105; Lewis, “Addison,” 154, 158–159, 163; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 755; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 308; 405, 477; 689; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 294, 345, 519, 1569–1570. 113. Lewis, Collected Poems, 362. 114. Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 221. 115. Lewis, “Addison,” 154. 116. For more on their negative views of Swift, see Glendinning, Jonathan Swift, 258. 117. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser,” 123; Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 173. 118. Clare, Bernard Shaw’s Irish Outlook, 65. I am summarising arguments made in duPlessis, “ecoLewis.” 119. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 405. 120. Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 220. 121. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 207. 122. Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” Weight of Glory, 99; Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 99; Lewis, “The World’s Last Night,” 96; Lewis, “On the Reading of Old Books.” 123. Lewis, “Learning In War-Time,” 584. 124. Kiberd, Irish Classics, 107–123. 125. For Lewis quoting from “The Deserted Village,” see Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 658; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 352. 126. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 101; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 69, 70, 174. 127. Goldsmith, Goldsmith: Selected Works, 828. 128. For Lewis’s tributes to Burke and/or quotes from the chivalry-related Marie Antoinette apostrophe from Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, see Lewis, “Addison,” 161; Lewis, “William Morris,” 227; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 767; Lewis. “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” 288. See also Lewis, “The Necessity of Chivalry.” 129. Lewis, “The Necessity of Chivalry,” 717. 130. Lewis, “Delinquents in the Snow,” 745. 131. Lewis, “Reply to Professor Haldane,” 76–77. 132. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 3, 630. 133. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 135. 134. As Conor Cruise O’Brien explains, “the great feminist Mary Wollstonecraft … took exception to his usurpation of the pronoun we to mean the English.” (O’Brien, “‘Setting People on Thinking’,” 99). 135. O’Brien, Great Melody. Michael Brown does an excellent job of exploring these tensions within Burke (and scrutinising O’Brien’s analysis) in Brown, “The English Identity of Edmund Burke.”

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136. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, 34–35. 137. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 465. 138. Ibid., 439. 139. Clare, “C.S. Lewis: An Irish Writer,” 27, 29–30. 140. Ward, Planet Narnia, 45; Lewis, Allegory of Love, 197. 141. For the importance of Ireland to Sterne and Tristram Shandy, see Clare, “Under-regarded Roots.” 142. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 332. 143. Ibid., 241. For Lewis explaining that he loved dipping into Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, see Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 142. 144. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 953. 145. Lewis, Four Loves, 33; Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 369; Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 120; Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 953. 146. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 241. 147. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 223. 148. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 702–703. 149. Osborn, “Deeper Realms.” Lewis mentions O’Neill’s Land Under England in Lewis, Preface to Dymer, 147. 150. Nicholson, “Bram Stoker and C.S. Lewis.” 151. Power, “Lord Dunsany.” 152. Bresland, Backward Glance, 99–103; Corrigan, Helen Waddell, 168–169, 205, 287. Lewis knew MacNeice and Waddell from their time studying at Oxford University. And he spent quite a bit of time with the important— if somewhat neglected—gay novelist Reid during his return trips to Ireland, in the company of their mutual close friend, Arthur Greeves (who was also gay). 153. Of the writers previously discussed in this chapter, all were raised or primarily raised in the Church of Ireland, with the exceptions of Reid and Waddell (who were from thoroughly Presbyterian backgrounds) and Joyce and O’Neill (who were both raised Catholic). 154. Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 342. 155. For Lewis’s engagement with Moore and Plunkett, see Lewis, Collected Letters, Vol. 1, 303, 545, 560; Lewis, All My Road Before Me, 307–308. I should explain my decision to label George Moore as “Catholic” here. Moore was raised in a Catholic Big House in Co. Mayo, and therefore his oeuvre has often been more of an inspiration to (and had more in common with) writers from Irish Catholic backgrounds, such as James Joyce and Frank O’Connor. It is true that Moore converted to Protestantism as an adult. However, given that he was a known atheist, most Irish people felt that Moore’s very public professions of conversion were simply the latest manifestation of his love of controversy and publicity, and that he had no intention of actually becoming an active, practic-

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ing member of the Church of Ireland. Indeed, as Adrian Frazier notes, the wider Irish public simply regarded the post-conversion Moore as a “bad” Catholic, not an actual Protestant. (Frazier, George Moore, 333.) 156. For more on Lewis’s “Ulster novel,” see Bresland, Backward Glance, 65–70. 157. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 24.

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Lewis, C.S. “Learning In War-Time.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000d. 579–586. Lewis, C.S. “Membership.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000e. 332–340. Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. New York: Touchstone, 1996b. Print. Lewis, C.S. “The Mythopoeic Gift of Rider Haggard.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000f. 559–562. Lewis, C.S. “The Necessity of Chivalry.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000g. 717–720. Lewis, C.S. “A Note on Jane Austen.” In Selected Literary Essays. Ed. Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. 175–186. Lewis, C.S. “On Juvenile Tastes.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000h. 476–478. Lewis, C.S. “On Science Fiction.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000i. 450–460. Lewis, C.S. “On the Reading of Old Books.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000j. 438–443. Lewis, C.S. Perelandra. New York: Scribner, 1996c. Print. Lewis, C.S. “Period Criticism.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000k. 487–490. Lewis, C.S. A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1942. Print. Lewis, C.S. “A Reply to Professor Haldane.” In On Stories and Other Essays on Literature. Ed. Walter Hooper. Orlando: Harcourt, 1982. 74–85. Lewis, C.S. The Screwtape Letters: Also Includes ‘Screwtape Proposes A Toast’. New York: Touchstone, 1996d. Print. Lewis, C.S. “The Sermon and the Lunch.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000l. 341–345. Lewis, C.S. Surprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. New  York: Harcourt, 1984. Print. Lewis, C.S. That Hideous Strength. New York: Scribner, 1996e. Print. Lewis, C.S. “Vivisection.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000m. 693–697. Lewis, C.S. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. London: Collins, 1997. Print. Lewis, C.S. “Why I Am Not a Pacifist.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Ed. Lesley Walmsley. London: HarperCollins, 2000n. 281–293. Lewis, C.S. “William Morris.” In Selected Literary Essays. Ed. Walter Hooper. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1980c. 219–231. Lewis, C.S. “The World’s Last Night.” In The World’s Last Night and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt, 1987. 93–113. Martin, Thomas L., ed. Reading the Classics with C.S. Lewis. Ada: Baker Academic, 2001. Print.

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McGrath, Alister. C.S. Lewis – A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013. Print. Nicholson, Mervyn. “Bram Stoker and C.S. Lewis: Dracula as a Source for That Hideous Strength.” Mythlore 19.3 (1993): 16–22. Print. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. “‘Setting People on Thinking’: Burke’s Legacy in the Debate on Irish Affairs.” In Edmund Burke: His Life and Legacy. Ed. Ian Crowe. Dublin: Four Courts, 1997. 94–103. Print. O’Brien, Conor Cruise. The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992. Print. Osborn, Marijane. “Deeper Realms: C.S. Lewis’ Re-Visions of Joseph O’Neill’s Land under England.” Journal of Modern Literature 25.1 (2001): 115–120. Print. Pavlac Glyer, Diana, and David Bratman. “C.S. Lewis Scholarship: A Bibliographical Overview.” In C.  S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy. Ed. Bruce L.  Edwards. Westport: Greenwood, 2007. Chapter 12. Print. Pearce, Joseph. C.S.  Lewis and the Catholic Church. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003. Print. Power, Edward. “Lord Dunsany.” The Irish Times 23 March 2002. Print. Reyes, A.T.  Introduction to C.S Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, by C.S. Lewis. New Haven: Yale UP, 2011. 1–33. Print. Shaw, Bernard. The Doctor’s Dilemma. London: Penguin, 1946. Print. Shaw, Bernard. Getting Married / Press Cuttings. London: Penguin, 1986. Print. Shaw, Bernard. John Bull’s Other Island. London: Penguin, 1984. Print. Shaw, Bernard. Man and Superman. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. Shaw, Bernard. The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet / Fanny’s First Play. London: Penguin, 1987. Print. Smith, Sandy. C.S.  Lewis and the Island of His Birth: The Places, the Stories, the Inspiration. Belfast: Lagan, 2013. Print. Stallworthy, Jon. Louis MacNeice. London: Faber & Faber, 1995. Print. Stephens, James. The Crock of Gold. London: Pan, 1973. Print. Ward, Michael. Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. Wilson, A.N. C.S. Lewis: A Biography. London: Harper, 1991. Print. Yeats, W.B. The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume I: The Poems. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.

CHAPTER 6

Gradations of Class Among Irish Anglicans in Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle

Abstract  In her 1977 novel Girl on a Bicycle, Leland Bardwell is keen to depict the subtle variations in social class standing between the different Irish Anglican characters. Bardwell ultimately suggests that the nature and degree of an Irish Anglican’s Irish/British hybridity varies, depending on where one is located on the social scale and where one resides. She suggests that the quotient of “Britishness” is often higher and more political among Big House owners, Ulster working-class Anglicans, and middleclass Anglicans from across the island who deliberately mimic and uphold the gentry. By contrast, Irishness is often more to the fore for Anglican people outside of Ulster whose backgrounds are self-avowedly middleclass (as with protagonist Julie and her family) or working-class. According to Bardwell, Irish people from Catholic Nationalist backgrounds often ignore such subtle distinctions, regarding all Irish Anglicans as somewhat “English.” Keywords  Leland Bardwell • Ulster Britishness • Social Class • Irish Women’s Writing • Big House Literature

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Clare, Irish Anglican Literature and Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68353-5_6

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Since the 1970s, several Irish Anglican writers have been hailed as the “last” of the “Anglo-Irish” writers, including Elizabeth Bowen, Denis Johnston, Samuel Beckett, Molly Keane, and Richard Murphy.1 Of course, there are several issues associated with bestowing this laurel. First, there is (as previously noted) the slipperiness of the term “Anglo-Irish”: does it refer to people raised or partially raised in a Big House (like Bowen, Keane, and Murphy) or can it also apply to the children of middle-class professionals (such as Johnston and Beckett)? And, as Brendan Behan notes in a quote cited in the Introduction to this book, it is very telling that no commentators seem keen to apply the term to people from working-class Anglican backgrounds, including contemporaries of the aforementioned writers such as Stewart Parker. Second, even if we allow the term to apply to people from all class backgrounds who are descended from Big House families and humbler “Planters,” labelling someone the “last” person in this literary tradition implies that Irish Anglican writers no longer exist. This is obviously not true: after all, Denis Johnston’s daughter Jennifer continues to write fiction which is often explicitly concerned with the legacy of Ascendancy. Two celebrated Irish Anglican poets from Northern Ireland—Michael Longley and Gerald Dawe—are still working, and a third—Derek Mahon—has only recently passed away. There are also important playwrights and screenwriters from this background, such as Michael West, Stacey Gregg,2 and Stephen Bradley. And, if we expand the term “writer,” we could cite the work of celebrated Irish Anglican songwriters such as Van Morrison, Paul “Bono” Hewson, and Neil Hannon,3 as well as esteemed cultural commentators such as Edna Longley, R.F. “Roy” Foster, and Emilie Pine. Finally, even if we accept the (intentional?) implication of many critics that the term “Anglo-Irish” should only apply to Big House writers and to middle-class writers whose parents still had relatively close family ties to the gentry in the decades prior to the establishment of the Irish Free State, there are actually several writers who fit this description and who outlived Bowen, Johnston, Beckett, and Keane—if not Murphy. I refer especially to two writers who died in 2016: that avowed master of the Irish short story William Trevor and—the subject of this chapter—the underrated fiction writer, playwright, and poet Leland Bardwell. Bardwell was born in India to Patrick and Mary (née Collis) Hone, who both hailed from distinguished Irish Anglican families. (The Hone and Collis families had each produced successful writers; the Hone family tree

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also boasted prominent visual artists, and the Collis family had long distinguished itself within the medical profession.) After her father gave up his job as a railway engineer in India, Bardwell was raised from early childhood in genteel poverty in a ramshackle Georgian house in Leixlip, Co. Kildare. Her father worked as an artisan carpenter until his mini-factory burned down (possibly due to arson committed by disgruntled locals), and her mother took in paying guests to help make ends meet. Bardwell attended the Alexandra School in Dublin, but was not sent on—as one would expect—to Alexandra College (alma mater of important Irish women writers such as Edith Somerville, Winifred Letts, Mary Manning, and Dorothy Macardle). Because Leland was considered “wild”—and could not conceal her waywardness behind outward respectability as her sister Paloma could—her parents had no intention of encouraging her love of learning or facilitating her dream of attending Trinity College Dublin, where her brother Oliver went. Instead, Bardwell was sent to secretarial college, but her first proper job (besides running an informal horse-riding school with her sister) was as groom in the stables of Lord Farnham’s Big House in Co. Cavan in the summer of 1941. Bardwell only lasted three months in the job, and subsequently emigrated to Britain, where she lived for many years before returning to Ireland for good in 1960. As Bardwell demonstrates repeatedly in her 2008 autobiography, A Restless Life, much of her fiction draws on events from her own life. It was her time spent working for Lord Farnham that provided the inspiration for her first novel (and arguably her masterpiece), 1977’s Girl on a Bicycle. In the novel, which is set in the early 1940s, Lord Farnham is renamed “Lord Girvan,” and his Big House is placed in a fictionalised version of Co. Cavan (the county is unnamed, but readers are made repeatedly aware that it is on the border with Northern Ireland). As Anne Fogarty states, Julie de Vraie, the young groom who is the protagonist of this “picaresque, feminist fable,” is notable for “her bohemianism, unapologetic assumption of masculine prerogatives and sexual profligacy.”4 Julie’s rebellious behaviour defies the values and offends the sensibilities of most Catholic citizens of the puritanical Irish Free State, but also those of the Irish Anglicans in her life (whether her own family members, the Big House grandees, or the Irish Anglican locals on and around the Girvan estate). That said, as Christine St. Peter points out, Julie is not simply “maniacally reckless”; she is also “clear-eyed” and “politically astute.”5

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Literary critics who have examined this stellar novel, including Fogarty, St. Peter, and Heather Ingman, have focussed primarily on the book’s feminism and Julie’s attempts to cross invisible social barriers between people of different genders, classes, and religions.6 They have also suggested that the book is a critique of the “dying but still privileged Anglo-­ Irish aristocracy.”7 However, Bardwell is not simply concerned with the “false mores, arrogance, [and] self-deception” of Big House residents.8 As this chapter will demonstrate, she is also keen to depict the subtle variations in social class standing between the different Irish Anglican characters in the novel. This includes the aristocratic Big House owners; the “bourgeois,” middle-class protagonist Julie and her family;9 her love interest Bernard (who is originally from Northern Ireland and who has a lumber business); the middle-class locals with aristocratic pretensions; and the working-class labourers who work on the estate. A key point of tension in Girl on a Bicycle is the class disparity which exists between the middle-class Julie and her aristocratic employers, Lord and Lady Girvan. Bardwell emphasises throughout the novel that Julie, despite being Anglican, should not be conflated with wealthy Big House residents. The middle-class standing of Julie and her family is indicated repeatedly. We learn that Julie’s “forbears were burghers”;10 in other words, they were urban (or large town) bourgeoisie—not Big House landlords. This makes sense, given that—as the de Vraie surname suggests— she was descended from “Huguenot[s],”11 a group who came to Ireland between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and distinguished themselves in banking and specialist crafts before being assimilated into the Irish Anglican community. (Several famous Irish Anglican writers were of partial Huguenot descent, including—among others— Charles Maturin, Anna Maria Hall, J.S. Le Fanu, Dion Boucicault, Lady Gregory, and Samuel Beckett.) Early in the novel, we are told that Julie and her sister, as they walk from the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) showgrounds to a cousin’s house, are “passing the elbow of rich living in Clyde Road, Elgin Road and Herbert Park,”12 and it is clear that they are viewing that socially and materially elevated life from a distance. An additional sign of that distance is that these two characters repeatedly use Hiberno-English expressions that are unlikely to emanate from the mouths of aristocratic Big House residents—for example, calling their father “the da,” referring to jumps in an equestrian competition as “the leps,” talking about being on one’s “own-y-o,” and using the word “banjaxed” as a synonym for tiredness.13

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When Julie goes to work in the Big House, Lord and Lady Girvan repeatedly indicate that she is “lower” socially than they are, while not quite as lowly as the Catholic servants. (For example, she eats in the servants’ hall, but her room is definitely nicer than that of the older Catholic servant she befriends, Nellie.) When going out on the estate with Lord Girvan, Julie is made aware that “moving around in any way other than five paces behind [Lord Girvan] … constituted insubordination,” and when Lady Girvan and Julie approach each other on horseback, without exchanging words, Julie is expected to “squeeze … into the hedge to let [Lady Girvan] … pass.”14 Lord Girvan often “bark[s]” orders at her; he hates her friendships with “common” Roman Catholics in the town; and he is “extremely bothered” when one of his relations treats Julie as if she were “a ‘lady’.”15 And Lord Girvan’s daughter, Mrs. Travers, makes clear that, in her opinion, Julie has “no manners.”16 On a related note, when Mrs. Travers mentions the “fine bone and aristocratic blood” of a particular horse when discussing its “breeding” with Julie, there is a whiff of eugenics about the observations and perhaps a hint that she fears that Julie’s “breeding” might be somewhat suspect.17 The fiery Julie, however, does not accept such treatment as the natural order of things. She actively dislikes most of the Girvans, and repeatedly links them in her mind to British colonial violence, exploitation of the tenantry, and obnoxious condescension. (Bardwell interestingly shifts between first-person and third-person narration, and, while the socio-­ political perspective of the narration remains extremely similar in both cases, all of the negative observations quoted below occur when we are explicitly in Julie’s mind.) Julie internally notes Lord Girvan’s “military frame,” his “self-satisfied,” “proud,” and “lordly manner,” and his “perpetual rage.”18 Early in the novel, she surmises that Girvan Castle had originally been built “at the top of the hill to keep the enemy at a disadvantage.”19 And later, she notes: At the heel of the yard, the grumpy remains of the original castle, a mottled heap, was used for storing corn. The original Girvan, an English earl, must have had little to do except hurl the odd lead ball on the natives. Not much change, I reflected …20

Julie is also disparaging of Big House Anglicans for their inability to accommodate “free spirits” among them such as her elderly friend, Emily Cooper (Lord Girvan’s cousin, who commits suicide during the course of

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the novel) and Leonie Nestor (the aforementioned relation of Lord Girvan’s who treats Julie like a social equal). Julie admires Emily’s independence of mind and realism about the former Ascendancy’s declining influence in the new Ireland. And, reflecting on Leonie’s place within her family, Julie internally notes that “each generation” in a Big House dynasty “produce[s] one who, because of reserve and sensitivity, is unable to take part wholeheartedly in the boisterous family worship shared by their kin.”21 Julie believes that the “proper” behaviour that Emily and Leonie fail to exhibit is adhered to so rigorously by the gentry in order to emphasise their supposed superiority over those beneath them. The gentry’s obsession with social hierarchy draws particular ire from Julie throughout the novel. At Emily’s funeral, she inwardly remarks: “I had seen them arrive, the ‘county’!”22 The fact that the “quality” refer to themselves as the “county” is appalling to someone like Julie, who is friendly with county residents from all social classes and religious backgrounds. In the graveyard, she notes that “the gentry, with their adjustable grief, stood in exactly the correct positions dictated by their relationship with the deceased.”23 Social hierarchy is stressed again when Julie observes that, during the Girvan horse show, Mrs. Travers “bestowed smiles on the greater and lesser gentry, the lesser tradespeople, the professionals, as pigs in the middle, the doctor, the vet, the solicitor, the bank manager, Mrs Howard (the chemist’s wife—nearly a professional—and instigator of the minor cultural scene), the bishop, his son, [… and] the odious [estate worker] Brennen.”24 For all of Julie’s misgivings about the Irish Anglican gentry, she still betrays a marked degree of cultural “Britishness” in her own life and even in some of her reactions to the Girvans. I am not simply referring to the fact that her family are, by their own reckoning, “horsey people”25—with all of the implications of Ascendancy “poshness” that goes along with participating in the annual Horse Show at the RDS and owning pedigree horses. Other indications are her “sneaking regard” for Lady Girvan,26 and her occasionally lavish praise when surveying the estate house and grounds. At one point, she thinks: “Here one had to forgive. They had planted these marvellous trees, built these beautiful houses.”27 This echoes the praise of Big Houses and their grounds found in works by other middle-­class Irish Anglicans, such as W.B. Yeats (e.g. the 1928 poem “Ancestral Houses”) and even J.M. Synge (e.g. his 1907 essay “A Landlord’s Garden in County Wicklow”). And yet, even here, Julie’s praise is conflicted. Whereas Yeats and Synge praised the libraries in such

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Big Houses, Julie notes that Castle Girvan has a huge library with “many books” but that “nobody goes” into it.28 By contrast, she has “read all the books in Foyles’ twopenny lending library” in her hometown of Leixlip.29 (She seems to share with Oliver Goldsmith and other middle-class Anglicans a fear that the Irish gentry might, in fact, be intellectual “dullards.”)30 Similarly, Julie sometimes undercuts her praise of the beauty of the Castle Girvan estate with negative observations; for example, on one occasion, in the midst of internally praising the Big House, she references the “Angry Faces of the Ancestors”—that is, the portraits—that adorn the walls.31 Another manifestation of Julie’s cultural Britishness is her accent—and her ear for the accents of others. For example, she can easily see through attempts at sounding “posh” made by “new money” Catholics like O’Hagan (a relation of the cook): “He tried to control the attractive Northern vowel sounds by superimposing an upper-class drawl, which he mismanaged, and I laughed, oh so silently.”32 By contrast, there are clear indications in the novel that Julie, like Bardwell, was prevented by her family from picking up a demotic Irish accent and was forced to “speak properly” (i.e. in an RP accent).33 For example, when Julie and her cousin Nicholas Taylor are socialising loudly in the small hours of the morning at his house in Dublin with two friends (one an English-educated Trinity lecturer and the other Czech), a presumably Catholic neighbour appears; he asks the party to quiet down, and—when it becomes clear they won’t— he calls them “English cunts!”34 To this neighbour’s Irish Catholic ears, the accents of Irish Anglicans like Julie and Nicholas sound unequivocally “English.” While Julie’s accent might be quite similar to that of Lord and Lady Girvan, she steadfastly refuses to be conflated with them. When Nicholas says to her: “Now, my dear, you can tell me more about your associates since you’ve joined the earldom,” she sharply responds: “Joined?” before going “stubbornly silent”—a sign that she definitely dissociates herself from the aristocrats in the Castle.35 In the end, a perfect sign of her cultural positioning might be the moment when she internally compares herself to “Boadicea”36—a Celtic figure beloved of English Victorians—as she rides a horse and trap in a way that she suspects might displease Lord Girvan. That is, as an Irish Anglican, her cultural Britishness is more pronounced than that of her Irish Catholic neighbours (whose Britishness was more comparable to that of occupied subaltern populations in other British colonies) but less than that of Big

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House residents. As Julie herself puts it at one point, when staring at Mrs. Travers’s children (who split their time between Castle Girvan and London and who are being educated at English public schools), Julie “felt helplessly unable to probe the dark English veneer of the nobility.”37 Julie’s middle-class identity (and socio-cultural distance from the aristocracy) is further confirmed when she first meets one of her main love interests in the novel: Bernard, an older man who runs a lumber business and who was raised in a “liberal,” middle-class, “Protestant” home outside Omagh, Co. Tyrone.38 When Julie refers to “supper” as “tea,” he remarks “How bourgeois!”39 Later in the novel, he criticises her for her “petty bourgeois mind,” which for him is redolent of “suburbia.”40 In many important respects, Julie’s mind is actually much freer and more liberal than his, which is why she later castigates him for his “petit bourgeois suburbia, lace curtain” fear of what the neighbours think and his (to Julie) all-too-familiar, middle-class, Irish Anglican social snobbery—he actually calls her Catholic friend Mooney a “puffy peasant.”41 But the point still stands: as distasteful as Bernard may be (and he actually chokes Julie during the row over Mooney), his middle-class, Irish Anglican background means that he is well positioned to spot that Julie is thoroughly middle-class and not from the gentry. Indeed, he shares her predominantly negative view of Big House Anglicans, making disparaging remarks regarding “rich Anglo-­ Irish landowner[s]” and other members of the gentry, including (in his words) “spinsters [and…] grey-green pimply youths, hot from the dormitories of British public schools. All jolly good sorts.”42 He is not at all surprised by Lord Girvan’s poor treatment of Emily Cooper; he suggests that the aristocratic “society” to which the wider Girvan clan belongs is “dwindling … so all the members have to be counted and kept in line.”43 While Bernard—like Julie—may consider himself quite different from the Irish Anglican gentry, he still retains a marked degree of “Britishness,” as far as the Catholic locals are concerned. Bernard tries to connect with everyone, and we only get full confirmation of his secret (possibly sectarian) social snobbery and his violent misogyny late in the novel. As such, there is no glaring reason why the locals should not like him. And yet, when Julie asks Mooney for his opinion of Bernard, he replies: “He’s all right. A bit Englishy.”44 This is a clear sign that, while Irish Anglicans like Julie and Bernard can clearly see the negative aspects of the gentry and the historical wrongs in which all Irish Anglicans have been implicated (as part of the Ascendancy), they still remain somewhat “Other” to the Catholic “plain people of Ireland.”

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This sense of alienation from the wider populace was worsened in the decades after independence thanks to the measures taken by the Irish Free State and its Catholic populace which deliberately discriminated against Protestants. For example, the outlawing of divorce in the Irish Free State in 1925 greatly distressed Irish Anglicans and, indeed, Irish Protestants of all denominations. The debate on the divorce legislation in the Seanad (Irish Senate) inspired poet, playwright, and senator W.B. Yeats to deliver his famous speech insisting on the importance of Protestants—but especially the former Ascendancy—to Ireland, past, present, and future: We against whom you have done this thing, are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe. We are the people of Burke; we are the people of Grattan; we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We have created the best of its political intelligence.45

This is clearly a blinkered and overly idealised perspective regarding the Ascendancy’s role in Irish history. (Most notably, Yeats ignores the fact that, thanks to oppressive measures endorsed by that same Anglican Ascendancy, Irish Catholic people were for centuries prevented from making the same kind of mark/impact with their writings—whether composed in English or Irish.) However, Yeats’s speech is important for two reasons. First, it speaks to the “siege mentality” that many Irish Protestants felt in the wake of independence. The Protestant community’s sense of being under threat—despite most Protestants striving to just “keep their head down”—only got worse in the middle decades of the twentieth century, thanks to ever stricter enforcement of the Catholic Church’s Ne Temere decree (which forced the children of “mixed” [i.e. Protestant-­ Catholic] marriages to be raised Catholic) and the Fethard-on-Sea boycott in Co. Wexford in 1957 (a sectarian boycott of the village’s Protestant shops spearheaded by a local Catholic priest).46 The separation between faith communities being promoted by powerful actors within the twentysix counties makes Julie’s willingness to cross social barriers in Bardwell’s novel all the more brave and unusual. A second key aspect of Yeats’s speech is that he makes the astute prediction that Irish reunification will be delayed or even put off forever if the new Irish state continues to “impose on the [Protestant] minority what the minority consider to be oppressive legislation.”47 Bardwell’s novel, through the character of Bernard, demonstrates the negative effect that

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the Free State’s promotion of a hyper-Catholic ethos (and the North’s parallel attempts to create “a Protestant state for a Protestant people”)48 was already having on North/South relations—regardless of questions over future Irish unity. Bernard has moved to the Free State, but it seems that his upbringing in even more religiously segregated Northern Ireland has, as we have seen, left him feeling a degree of animus towards Catholic locals like Mooney. It is noteworthy that Bardwell shows such attitudes being present in someone who is actively trying to fit in “down South” and who is often critical of the sense of superiority associated with Ascendancy. The implication is that tensions between Northern Irish Protestants who are stauncher in their religious and socio-political views than Bernard and Catholics who identify as Irish (north and south of the border) will not be helped by the Irish government and the Catholic Church deliberately fostering distance between faith communities in the Free State through what are clearly anti-Protestant measures. As Bardwell shows in her novel, not all middle-class Irish Anglicans are like Julie and Bernard in eschewing a perceived connection to the Big House: she includes two middle-class characters in Girl on a Bicycle who seek to both emulate and uphold the gentry. One of these is the Anglican bishop’s son, James Poynton, “a small vulpine individual” who hypocritically declares himself “a Christian” but also attempts to sexually assault Julie.49 He follows Lord Girvan’s example in referring to grown, working-­ class men as “boy,”50 and he is forthright and unapologetic in his preservation of social distance from people he regards as beneath him. Indeed, we are told that, when he is introduced by Julie to Mooney, he is “full of incomprehensive horror at the sight of this member of the lower orders.”51 Similarly, May, the Irish Anglican psychiatric nurse who Lord Girvan has hired to look after Emily, also mimics the gentry and upholds their values. This stern, snobbish “woman of unparalleled hostility” echoes Mrs. Travers in regarding Julie as “bad-mannered.”52 Like James Poynton, she is something of a hypocrite: her rudeness to Julie and Emily is nothing if not bad-mannered. The snobbishness shared by James, May, and (we eventually learn) Bernard—from which Julie is refreshingly free—makes them look down on working-class people. However, one gets the sense that they do not just look down on Catholic working-class people: at one point, Bernard laments the presence in Ulster of the “poor Protestants with their craw-­ thumping” and “their orangery.”53 While Bernard’s remark clearly takes in both Anglicans and Presbyterians, it is commendable that Bardwell makes

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sure to include working-class Anglicans in this novel’s portrait of her faith community.54 As noted above, working-class Anglicans are often ignored when commentators discuss the “Anglo-Irish.” (On a related note, working-­class Ulster Protestants are often depicted as—or are uniformly assumed to be—Presbyterian or from some other “Dissenting” sect, usually of an Evangelical hue.) In the main, Julie seems to regard most of the working-class Irish Anglicans she meets with pity. She cannot seem to understand why they kowtow to aristocrats who treat them so badly. She notes the “working-class Protestants” who attend Emily’s funeral at the local Church of Ireland, but who stay out of the gentry’s way—as if the gentry are actually more important than they are.55 Similarly, she hates watching the wife of “the herd” Brennan abasing herself before Lord Girvan.56 When Julie accompanies Lord Girvan to the Brennen home, she finds it painful that the lord wears the “bland abstract smile” he reserves for tenants, while Mrs. Brennen “cringe[s] before the lord and master,” saying “remember me to her ladyship.”57 While Julie may feel a degree of sympathy for those who serve the “quality” so faithfully for very little reward, she has absolute disdain for those who actively promote—often by nefarious means—the gentry’s interests and (to her mind) warped values. An example of this is Brennen himself, who (as noted above) is regarded as “odious” by Julie.58 Brennen, who the Catholic locals regard as an “Orange bastard,”59 routinely spies on Julie on behalf of Lord and Lady Girvan, to make sure that she is behaving in a “proper” way. After he catches Bernard performing oral sex on Julie in a secluded spot outdoors at night, he ties a note to her bike “on the back of an invoice headed ‘Earl of Girvan Estates Ltd’” which says “‘HAVE A GOOD LICK’.”60 Brennen’s loyalty to Lord Girvan (and presumably to Britain) is unwavering and mirrors Lord Girvan’s own British loyalty. By contrast, Julie’s Britishness is essentially cultural, as opposed to political. The fact that her Britishness is less pronounced than Lord Girvan’s (and Brennen’s)—and that she is therefore suspect, as far as they are concerned—is perfectly clear to Julie. When she makes a suggestion with regard to a repair that shocks Lord Girvan, she internally notes that he regarded her “as if I’d suggested shooting at the British”61—not an idle phrase to use in a novel set during “the Emergency” (the neutral Irish Free State’s euphemism for World War II). And it is one that highlights Julie’s distance from a full-blown British identity.

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As we have seen, in Girl on a Bicycle, Bardwell demonstrates that— post-independence—the nature and degree of an Irish Anglican’s Irish/ British hybridity varies, depending on where one is located on the social scale and where one resides. She suggests that the quotient of Britishness is often higher and more political among Big House owners, Ulster working-­class Anglicans (even ones residing on the Free State side of the border), and middle-class Anglicans who deliberately mimic and uphold the gentry. By contrast, Irishness is often more to the fore for Anglican people outside of Ulster whose backgrounds are self-avowedly middle-­ class (as with Julie and her family) or working-class. Bardwell suggests that the situation is more fraught for middle-class Anglicans from the six counties like Bernard—they arguably have to work harder to shed the social snobbery associated with the legacy of Ascendancy and Protestant dominance in the Northern Irish statelet post-independence. Bardwell also suggests that, regardless of how much an Irish Anglican person may embrace Irishness and eschew association with political Britishness, Irish people from Catholic Nationalist backgrounds often ignore such subtle distinctions and regard all Irish Anglicans as somewhat “English.” A resentment over the exclusion of Protestants of all stripes from unequivocal “Irishness” can be traced in Bardwell’s next three novels. In London Winter (1981), The House (1984), and There We Have Been (1989), the middle-class, Irish Anglican protagonists struggle to bridge the perceived cultural gap between themselves and the Irish Catholics in their lives. In these works, a “Protestant” is always under suspicion of being a “West Brit,” whereas being “from a Catholic background” makes someone “satisfactorily” Irish in the eyes of everyone, including non-Irish people.62 And in Bardwell’s final novel Mother to a Stranger (2002)—in which the protagonist Nan is half-Jewish and half-Catholic—the character of “Barney the Protestant”63 is certainly “Othered” by his neighbours in a village in the northwest of Ireland. These works strongly suggest that personal experience had taught Bardwell that Protestants are required to (in Edna Longley’s famous words, already quoted in the Introduction) “work their passage to Irishness.”64 This is backed up by several comments in Bardwell’s autobiography. For example, she notes the distrust that Catholics felt towards her for being “one of them,” and that her “Protestant background” made her seem somehow less Irish to many people.65 Even in bohemian circles in London in the 1950s where “being Irish” was (to some degree) a social advantage, she recalls that the male artists:

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who were only hanging on by the skin of their teeth were the cleverest at throwing out barbs—or, to use the current jargon, knew exactly which buttons to press. A remark like, ‘You’re only a Protestant, how could you know,’ said with cruel innuendo, could nearly crucify you. Many’s the flood of tears that followed such a comment.66

What too often prevents Irish Anglicans from being regarded as “fully Irish,” even by non-Irish people, is the British elements detectable in their cultural makeup. Going into the future, it will be interesting to see if this remains an issue—especially given the disappearance of the “Protestant accent” over recent decades (as observed by Roy Foster)67 and Ireland’s need to embrace more hyphenated identities as it assimilates the “New Irish” and potentially, in due course, Ulster Protestants. Another complicating factor will be the potential break-up or reorganising (on federal terms) of the United Kingdom. How will Irish Anglican Britishness (or, indeed, Ulster Scots Britishness) endure if Britishness is dispensed with altogether by the English, Scottish, and Welsh?68 What should be clear, here at the end of this book, is that, despite their pronounced Irish/British hybridity (and, in some cases, Loyalist or Unionist convictions), Irish Anglican writers from Farquhar through to Bardwell have frequently cast quite a critical eye on Britain (though usually—more specifically—on England) as well as on British interests in Ireland. What should also be abundantly clear is the (perhaps surprising) strength of the Irish identities of these same writers. The striking depth and durability of their Irishness should—hopefully—prevent any Corkery-­ esque attempts to expel them from the “truly Irish” canon in years to come.

Notes 1. With regard to these writers, see, for example, Miller Casey, “Review of Elizabeth Bowen”; Kilroy, “The Moon in the Yellow River: Denis Johnston’s Shavianism,” 50; Montague, “The Life and Work of Samuel Beckett,” 62; Kellaway, “Molly Keane: A Life by Sally Phipps”; Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950, 80. 2. It should be noted that, although Gregg is descended from Church of Ireland stock, she was raised in a non-churchgoing household. Among scriptwriters, one might also list Rosemary Jenkinson, who is from a mixed Ulster Protestant background. Her mother was Presbyterian, and her father was Church of Ireland. She went to a Presbyterian church until she

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was eleven; then, after her family moved house, she attended the local Church of Ireland. However, it should be noted that she let me know (only somewhat facetiously) that she prefers the label “Eirecan Anglican”—in order to stress the Irishness of the Church of Ireland versus the Englishness often associated with the Anglican Communion more generally. (Personal email. Received 10 June 2020.) 3. Although Van Morrison attended St. Donard’s Church of Ireland during his formative years (and mentions the church and its “Sunday six bells” in several songs), it should be acknowledged that—for approximately two or three years—his mother brought him to Jehovah’s Witnesses meetings. This period is reflected in his song “Kingdom Hall” from the Wavelength (1978) album. If we expand the term “Anglican” to include Methodists—since Methodism grew out of Anglicanism and since the Church of Ireland and the Irish Methodist Church have been in “covenant” since 2002—we could also list the Meteor Award-winning singer-songwriter from Co. Tyrone, Juliet Turner. 4. Fogarty, “Fiction 1960–1995,” 265. 5. St. Peter, Changing Ireland, 53. 6. Ingman, Irish Women’s Fiction, 183; St. Peter, Changing Ireland, 54–56; Fogarty, “Fiction 1960–1995,” 265. 7. St. Peter, Changing Ireland, 55. See also Ingman, Irish Women’s Fiction, 182; Fogarty, “Fiction 1960–1995,” 265. 8. Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 65. 9. Ibid., 84, 147. 10. Ibid., 89. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 15. 13. Ibid., 7, 12; 11; 84; 100. 14. Ibid., 44; 31. 15. Ibid., 75; 71; 143; 142. 16. Ibid., 152. 17. Ibid., 81. 18. Ibid., 24; 65; 64; 65; 75. 19. Ibid., 24. 20. Ibid., 63. 21. Ibid., 142. 22. Ibid., 68. 23. Ibid., 69. It is noteworthy that the hymn sung during the funeral service itself is “Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,” since that is the hymn sung by Mrs. Rooney in Samuel Beckett’s All that Fall (1957), a play about Irish Anglican religious hypocrisy and sociopolitical decline.

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Bardwell alludes to that same Beckett play in her 1991 poem “Clondalkin Concrete.” (Bardwell, Them’s Your Mammy’s Pills, 46.) 24. Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 181. 25. Ibid., 17. 26. Ibid., 112. 27. Ibid., 142. 28. Ibid., 156. 29. Ibid., 49. 30. Kiberd, Irish Classics, 304. 31. Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 94. 32. Ibid., 93. This portrait of a “new money” Irish Catholic mimicking the deposed Ascendancy recalls Bardwell’s 2006 poem “The Horse Protestant Joke is Over,” which covers the same topic. (Bardwell, Them’s Your Mammy’s Pills, 127.) 33. Bardwell, Restless Life, 89. 34. Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 124. 35. Ibid., 117. 36. Ibid., 64. 37. Ibid., 87. Emphasis mine. 38. Ibid., 105. Julie’s other main love interest is her aforementioned cousin, Nicholas Taylor. 39. Ibid., 84. Bernard’s mistress Rose (whose religious affiliation is never disclosed) later draws the same conclusion from Julie’s reference to “tea” as opposed to “supper.” (Ibid., 147.) 40. Ibid., 161. 41. Ibid., 180; 161. 42. Ibid., 92. As noted in the Introduction to this book, Bardwell (like Behan) tended to use the term “Anglo-Irish” for upper-class Irish Anglicans and “Protestant” for middle- and working-class Irish Anglicans. For examples from this novel, see Ibid., 35, 36, 65, 69, 92. 43. Ibid., 92. 44. Ibid., 157. 45. Yeats, Senate Speeches, 99. 46. For more on the Ne Temere decree and the Fethard-on-Sea boycott, see O’Connor, “‘My mother wouldn’t have been as hurt’.” 47. Yeats, Senate Speeches, 92. 48. This frequently cited statement is a condensed, distorted version of what Northern Ireland prime minister Sir James Craig actually said in the Parliament of Northern Ireland on 24 April 1934. His actual words were: They still boast of Southern Ireland being a Catholic state. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant parliament and Protestant state. (As quoted in Lynch, Partition of Ireland, 217.)

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Within the context of my arguments here, it is noteworthy that he made this statement in response to what he and other Northern Irish Unionists saw as the hyper-Catholic ethos and agenda of the Irish Free State government. 49. Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 27; 48. 50. Ibid., 31, 47. As Fogarty notes, Julie “is frequently subject to predatory male assaults”; the framing of these is a key part of Bardwell’s feminist agenda in the novel. (Fogarty, “Fiction 1960–1995,” 265.) 51. Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 52. 52. Ibid., 32; 36. 53. Ibid., 92. 54. Bardwell also shows keen awareness of the existence of “poor Protestants” in her autobiography. (Bardwell, Restless Life, 79, 242.) 55. Bardwell, Girl on a Bicycle, 69. 56. Ibid., 45. 57. Ibid., 56; 56; 57. 58. Ibid., 181. 59. Ibid., 45. 60. Ibid., 165. 61. Ibid., 77. 62. Bardwell, London Winter, 165; 165; 166; 166. 63. Bardwell, Mother to a Stranger, 53. In interviews after the publication of Mother to a Stranger, Bardwell indicated that she had completed a sixth— as yet unpublished—novel, entitled All Those Men. (See, for example, Battersby, “Girl in a Hurry.”) 64. Longley, “Anglo-Irish Resurrection,” 106. 65. Bardwell, Restless Life, 59; 213. 66. Ibid., 213. 67. Foster, “Preface: The Protestant Accent,” xxiv. It should be noted that this accent is sometimes called the “Trinity accent.” (Glendinning, Jonathan Swift, 69.) 68. For more on this, see O’Toole, “Demand for Britishness is High but the Supply is Drying Up.”

References Bardwell, Leland. Girl on a Bicycle. Dublin: Liberties, 2009. Print. Bardwell, Leland. London Winter. Dublin: Co-Op, 1981. Print. Bardwell, Leland. Mother to a Stranger. Belfast: Blackstaff, 2002. Print. Bardwell, Leland. A Restless Life. Dublin: Liberties, 2008. Print. Bardwell, Leland. Them’s Your Mammy’s Pills and Other Poems. Dublin: Dedalus, 2015. Print.

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Battersby, Eileen. “Girl in a Hurry  – But Stuck.” The Irish Times 29 April 2002. Print. Fogarty, Anne. “Fiction 1960–1995.” In A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature. Eds. Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018. 260–276. Print. Foster, Roy. “Preface: The Protestant Accent.” In Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s Search for a Place in Independent Ireland. Eds. Ian d’Alton and Ida Milne. Cork: Cork UP, 2019. xxi–xxiv. Print. Glendinning, Victoria. Jonathan Swift. London: Pimlico, 1999. Print. Goodby, John. Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Print. Ingman, Heather. Irish Women’s Fiction: From Edgeworth to Enright. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2013. Print. Kellaway, Kate. “Molly Keane: A Life by Sally Phipps review – mother, writer, mentor….” The Guardian 29 January 2017. Print. Kiberd, Declan. Irish Classics. London: Granta, 2000. Print. Kilroy, Thomas. “The Moon in the Yellow River: Denis Johnston’s Shavianism.” In Denis Johnston: A Retrospective. Ed. Joseph Ronsley. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1981. 49–58. Print. Longley, Edna. “Anglo-Irish Resurrection.” Honest Ulsterman 82 (1986): 102–108. Print. Lynch, Robert. The Partition of Ireland, 1918–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019. Print. Miller Casey, Ellen. “Review of Elizabeth Bowen, by Victoria Glendinning.” Best Sellers: The Monthly Book Review 38.1 (1978): 18. Print. Montague, John. “The Life and Work of Samuel Beckett.” In Nobel Prize Library: Samuel Beckett / Björnstjerne Björnson / Pearl Buck / Ivan Bunin. New York: Gregory, 1971. 59–70. Print. O’Connor, Catherine. “‘My mother wouldn’t have been as hurt’: Women and Inter-church Marriage in Wexford, 1945–65.” In Protestant and Irish: The Minority’s Search for a Place in Independent Ireland. Eds. Ian d’Alton and Ida Milne. Cork: Cork UP, 2019. 229–245. Print. O’Toole, Fintan. “Demand for Britishness is High but the Supply is Drying Up.” The Irish Times 26 March 2019. Print. St. Peter, Christine. Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Print. Yeats, W.B. The Senate Speeches of W.B. Yeats. Ed. Donald R. Pearce. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1960. Print.

Index1

A Abbey Theatre, 45n65, 66 See also Irish Literary Theatre Accents, 6, 56, 100, 129, 135, 138n67 Acts of Union (1707), 6 Acts of Union (1800), 6 Africa/African, 12, 14n8, 18n40 Aisling poems, 72 Alexandra School and Alexandra College, 125 Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, 16n16 Anglican Communion, 15n13, 136n2 “Anglo-Irish” (contentious term for Irish Anglicans), 2–14, 14n9, 15n10, 15n12, 15n16, 16n24, 19n43, 26–41, 50, 54–59, 59n5, 67–72, 74–76, 79, 80n14, 81n33, 99, 109–111, 124–135

Anglo-Normans, 5, 67 Anglophone, 8, 10, 67–70, 72, 74, 79 “Anti-Englishness,” 14, 19n43, 50, 58, 59, 79, 111 Anti-imperialist, 57, 66 See also British Empire; Colonialism Antiquarians/antiquarianism, 67, 69, 72, 73 Aquino, John, 98 Arbuthnot, John, 37 Argentina/Argentinian, 12 Arnold, Matthew, 72 Ascendancy, 5, 15n12, 31, 66–79, 124, 128, 130–132, 134, 137n32 Atkinson, Robert, 76 Atlantic Archipelago (traditionally “British Isles”), 17n31 Austen, Jane, 79, 88 Australia/Australian, 12, 51, 57

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Clare, Irish Anglican Literature and Drama, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68353-5

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142 

INDEX

B Balfour, Mary, 11, 67, 68, 73–75, 78 contributions to General Collection of Ancient Irish Music (ed. Edward Bunting), 73 Hope, a Poetical Essay: With Various Other Poems, 73–75 Kathleen O’Neil (melodrama), 74 “Kathleen O’Neil” (poem), 73–74 Bardwell, Leland, 4, 8, 11, 14n9, 19n42, 55, 124–135 All Those Men (unpublished novel), 138n63 “Clondalkin Concrete,” 137n23 Girl on a Bicycle, 14n9, 124–135 “The Horse Protestant Joke is Over,” 137n32 The House, 134 Mother to a Stranger, 138n63 A Restless Life, 19n42, 125, 138n54 That London Winter, 134 There We Have Been, 134 Barfield, Owen, 106 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin, 32, 42n3 Beckett, J.C., 5 Beckett, Samuel, 8, 9, 11, 14n10, 19n42, 94–97, 124, 126, 136–137n23 All That Fall, 136n23 “Dante and the Lobster,” 96 Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, 94 Endgame, 96, 97 More Pricks Than Kicks, 94 Not I, 97 Trilogy (Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable), 95, 96 Whoroscope, 94 Behan, Brendan, 2–4, 9, 72, 124, 137n42 The Hostage, 72 Behrendt, Stephen C., 75

Beiner, Guy, 75 Belfast, 2, 6, 8, 18n38, 73, 87–89, 93, 94, 105, 112n5 Bell, Sam Hanna, 4 Berkeley, George, 70, 109–110 Three Dialogues, 110 Bhabha, Homi, 8, 13, 17n27 Bickerstaffe (or Bickerstaff), Isaac, 36, 41 Big House, 2–4, 6, 66, 69, 80n14, 117n155, 124–130, 132, 134 Blake, William, 88, 90 Bloom, Harold, 103 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, 66 Boru, Brian, 69 Boswell, James, 36, 112n5 Boucicault, Dion, 5, 8, 11, 33, 41, 50–59, 72, 126 Arrah-na-Pogue, 51, 52, 59–60n11 The Colleen Bawn, 51 London Assurance, 33 The O’Dowd, 53 The Shaughraun, 51, 72 Bourke, Hannah Maria, 75 Bowen, Elizabeth, 3, 9, 14, 19n43, 50, 72, 124 The Last September, 19n43, 72 Bradley, Stephen, 124 Brady, Charles A., 93 Brazil/Brazilian, 12 Bresland, Ronald W., 94, 117n152 Brexit, 6, 11 Bridget, 30, 43n13, 95 Britain, 2, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 71–73, 125, 133, 135 British descent/ancestry/forebears, 2, 4, 5, 7, 13, 33, 68, 73, 74, 112n5, 127 British Empire, 7, 8, 17n27, 33, 36, 38, 57, 58, 105 British government, 5, 9, 10, 13, 15n13, 56–58

 INDEX 

British Isles, see Atlantic Archipelago (traditionally “British Isles”) British military, 17n27, 32, 57, 58 Britishness, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 16n25, 17n27, 18n39, 38, 110, 112n5, 128–130, 133–135 See also Britons; Hybridity British monarchy, 13, 19n42, 32–36, 50, 52, 53 Britons, 7, 31, 38, 40 See also Britishness; Hybridity Brooke, Charlotte, 3, 11, 66–79 “Gracey Nugent,” 68, 71 “Mäon,” 73, 74 Reliques of Irish Poetry, 66, 67 Brooke, Henry, 67, 70 The Fool of Quality, 67 Brown, Michael, 6, 116n135 Brown, Terence, 5, 89 Browning, Robert, 88 Bull, John (caricature of England), 37, 38 Bunting, Edward, 73, 75 Burke, Edmund, 17n31, 36, 70, 107–108, 116n128, 116n135, 131 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 107, 108, 116n128 C Cambodia, 17n28 Cambridge, University of, 88 Campbell College, 88, 94 Canada/Canadian, 12, 57 Canon (literary), 50, 87–111 Cardiff, 12 Carpenter, Humphrey, 99 Castle, Gregory, 54 Catholics/Catholicism, see Irish Gaelic Catholics; Roman Catholics/ Roman Catholicism Cavan, County, 66, 67, 125

143

Cave, Richard Allen, 51, 59n9 Celtic (Fringe/Twilight/etc.), 13, 33, 35, 36, 92, 129 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 88 Chesterton, G.K., 99 Childers, Erskine, 8, 11, 50–59 The Riddle of the Sands, 50, 56–58 Childers, Molly (née Osgood), 57 China/Chinese, 12, 17n28, 18n40, 101 Chivalry, 76, 107, 116n128 Church of England, 15n13, 136n2 Church of Ireland, 4–6, 8, 10, 13, 14n7, 15n11, 15n13, 26, 58, 73, 117n153, 118n155, 133, 135–136n2, 136n3 Clive, Kitty, 36, 44n45 Coffey, Brian, 9, 95 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 78 Collins, Michael, 58, 79, 82n70 Colonialism, 4, 7, 8, 13, 17n27, 17n28, 36, 53, 59, 105–106, 111, 127, 129 See also Anti-imperialist; British Empire Congreve, William, 26, 45n59, 70 Connemara, 54 Connolly, Linda, 17n27 Coole Park, 66 See also Gort, Co. Galway; Kiltartan/Kiltartanese Cork (city and county), 3, 19n40, 97, 101, 112n5 Corkery, Daniel, 50, 58, 135 Cornwall, 13 Corporaal, Marguérite, 32 Costello, Louisa Stuart, 75 Covent Garden (Theatre), 27, 29, 36 Cowley, Abraham, 78 Craig, Sir James, 137n48 Cuchulain, 70, 75, 76, 92, 113n36 Cullingford, Elizabeth Butler, 51

144 

INDEX

D Dáil Éireann, 56 Davis, Leith, 59n5, 67, 74, 75, 80n9 Davys, Mary, 32, 41 The Northern Heiress, 32 Dawe, Gerald, 5, 10, 15n10, 124 de Chirico, Giorgio, 105 de Valera, Éamon, 18n40, 58 Deane, Seamus, 17n31, 42n1 Derry (city), 73 Devlin, Denis, 9, 95 Diaspora, see Irish Diaspora Diderot, Denis, 42n3 Digby, George, 29 Disestablishment (of the Church of Ireland), 5 Dissenters, 5, 10 See also Ulster Scots Presbyterians Divorce, 16n16, 131 Donegal, County, 93 Douglas, Aileen, 31 Druid Theatre Company, 82n70 Drury Lane (Theatre Royal), 32, 39, 43n27 Dryden, John, 78 Dublin, 2, 3, 16n19, 26–28, 30, 31, 37, 51, 54, 59n11, 93, 94, 100, 103, 125, 129 Duels, 36, 37, 44n47 Dunsany, Lord (né Edward Plunkett), 110 duPlessis, Nicole, 105 E Eagleton, Terry, 54, 59n5 Earls, Brian, 54 Easter Rising of 1916, 45n65, 56 Edgeworth de Firmont, L’Abbé Henry Essex, 80n13 Edgeworth, Maria, 3, 5, 7, 11, 32, 41, 43n28, 66–79

The Absentee, 68, 70, 71 Castle Rackrent, 68, 71, 80n19 The Double Disguise, 43n28 Ennui, 68, 69, 80n19 An Essay on Irish Bulls, 69, 70 Eton Montem, 32, 43n28 Old Poz, 32 Ormond, 69, 70 “To-Morrow,” 70 Edgeworth, Richard Lovell, 69, 80n13, 80n19 Eliot, T.S., 94, 95 Elizabethan (era), 77, 99 Emmet, Robert, 2, 131 England/English, 2, 3, 5–11, 13, 17n27, 17n31, 18n39, 18n40, 19n42, 19n43, 26, 28–33, 35–41, 42n4, 43n9, 43n28, 50–59, 66, 67, 70–74, 76, 77, 79, 87–89, 91, 94, 100, 101, 105, 107–109, 111, 127, 129–131, 134, 135 Englishness, 6, 31, 56, 57, 136n2 See also Stage English characters Enlightenment, 95 Evangelicals/Evangelicalism, 4, 133 F Famine(s), including the Great Hunger of 1845–1852, 3, 66 Farquhar, George, 11, 26, 28, 32, 33, 38, 39, 41, 50, 55, 58, 70, 109, 135 The Beaux Stratagem, 32 The Constant Couple, 38, 39 Love and a Bottle, 28, 55, 60n28 The Recruiting Officer, 32, 33 Sir Harry Wildair, 38 The Stage-Coach, 28 The Twin Rivals, 28

 INDEX 

Feminism/feminist/proto-feminism/ female emancipation, 27–29, 41, 43n12, 45n65, 116n134, 125, 126, 138n50 See also #WakingTheFeminists (WTF) Fenian Cycle, 70, 76, 113n36 See also Legends; Mythology; Sagas Fenians/Fenianism, 51 Ferguson, Samuel, 75, 79 Fethard-on-Sea, Co. Wexford (the 1957 boycott), 131, 137n46 Flood, Henry, 36 Fogarty, Anne, 125, 126, 138n50 Folklore/folktales, 54, 66, 73 Foster, John Wilson, 5, 10, 15n10 Foster, R.F. “Roy,” 5, 15n10, 54, 124, 135 Fox, Charles, 36 France/French, 31, 38, 41, 80n13, 90 Frazier, Adrian, 118n155 Frisian Islands, 56 G Gaelic Athletic Association, 18n38 Galway (city and county), 66, 80n14, 82n70 Gardiner, Michael, 6 Garrick, David, 36, 43n27 Gate Theatre (Dublin), 38 Germany/German, 7, 18n40, 56 Glasgow, 12 Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, 56 Goldini, Carlo, 39 Goldsmith, Oliver, 6, 11, 26, 31, 32, 39, 41, 50, 70, 107, 129 “The Deserted Village,” 107, 116n125 She Stoops to Conquer, 32, 39, 107 The Vicar of Wakefield, 107

145

Good Friday Agreement (a.k.a. Belfast Agreement) of 1998, 11, 18n38 Gooding-Williams, Robert, 55 Gort, Co. Galway, 66 See also Coole Park; Kiltartan/ Kiltartanese Graham, Colin, 17n27 Grattan, Henry, 131 Graves, Clotilde, 44n29 A Mother of Three, 44n29 Gray, Betsy, 75 Great Britain, see Britain Great War, see World War I (a.k.a. the Great War) Greeves, Arthur, 89, 90, 96, 117n152 Gregg, Stacey, 124, 135n2 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 3, 11, 54, 66–79, 126 Cathleen ni Houlihan (co-written with W.B. Yeats), 79 Cuchulain of Muirthemne, 75, 81n48 Grania, 77, 79 The Rising of the Moon, 79 “A Woman’s Sonnets,” 66 Gregory, Sir William (and the Gregory Clause), 3, 66 Griffin, Michael, 6, 9, 42n6 Griffith, Arthur, 56 Griffith, Elizabeth, 6, 9, 11, 16n19, 26–41, 59n7 Amana: A Dramatic Poem, 42n3 The Barber of Seville, 42n3 The Delicate Distress, 42n4 Dorval; or, the Test of Virtue, 42n3 The Double Mistake, 29–31, 44n47 Essays, Addressed to Young Married Women, 42n4 The History of Lady Barton, 42n4 The Morality of Shakespeare’s Drama Illustrated, 42n4 Novellettes, 42n4

146 

INDEX

Griffith, Elizabeth (cont.) The Platonic Wife, 27–29, 36, 41, 42n6, 43n9 The School for Rakes, 30, 32–36, 38, 41, 44n47 A Series of Genuine Letters Between Henry and Frances (co-written with Richard Griffith), 27 The Story of Lady Juliana Harley, 42n4 The Times, 16n19, 31, 39–40, 45n59 Theodorick, King of Denmark, 42n3 A Wife in the Right, 31, 36–38, 40 H Haggard, H. Rider, 88 Hall, Anna Maria (a.k.a. Anna Maria Fielding and “Mrs. S.C. Hall”), 32–33, 126 Mabel’s Curse, 33 St. Pierre, the Refugee (a.k.a. The French Refugee), 32 Hannon, Neil, 124 Henryson, Robert, 112n5 Herbert, George, 112n5 Hewson, Paul “Bono,” 124 Hiberno-English, 66, 77, 126 See also Kiltartan/Kiltartanese Hogan, Liam, 18n40 Home Rule, 13, 56–59 Hooker, Thomas, 78 Hooper, Walter, 90 Huguenots, 18n40, 51, 126 Huxley, Aldous, 105 Hybridity (Irish/British hybridity), 8–14, 17n27, 38, 57–59, 88, 111, 123, 134, 135 Hyde, Douglas, 77, 79, 82n56 Love Songs of Connaught, 77

I Independence (establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922), 7, 8, 58, 79, 131, 134 India/Indian, 8, 12, 18n40, 37–38, 124, 125 Indonesia, 17n28 Ingman, Heather, 126 Interculturalism, 5, 8, 11–13, 17n28, 18n40, 67–69, 126, 135 Intermarriage/“mixed” marriages, 68–69, 80n14, 131 Irish Civil War of 1922–1923, 51, 56 Irish Convention of 1917–1918, 57–58 Irish Diaspora, 12, 44n45, 56, 93 Irish Free State/Republic (“the twenty-six counties”), 2, 3, 5–9, 11–13, 14n8, 15n11, 16n24, 17n27, 18–19n40, 19n42, 26–30, 32, 35, 36, 38, 41, 50–52, 54, 56–59, 59n11, 66, 67, 69–74, 80n19, 88, 91–94, 96, 100, 101, 105, 108, 111, 112n2, 117n152, 125, 126, 128, 130–132, 134, 135 Irish Gaelic Catholics, 2, 5, 9, 12–14, 16n16, 16n24, 17n30, 28, 50, 52, 53, 66–76, 78, 80n13, 80n14, 111, 117–118n155, 118n153, 125, 127, 129–134, 137n32, 137n48 Irish language/Gaeilge, 10, 18n38, 18n40, 54, 66–77, 80n19, 82n56, 96, 108 Irish Literary Revival/Revivalists, 67–68, 79 Irish Literary Theatre, 26, 66 See also Abbey Theatre Irish Methodists, 136n3

 INDEX 

Irishness, 5, 8, 11–13, 26, 30, 41, 54, 56, 88, 94–96, 110, 111, 134, 135, 136n2 Irish people of colour, 4, 12, 14n8, 18n40, 135 See also “New Irish” Irish Quakers, 4 Irish Repertory Theatre, 82n70 Irish Studies, 11, 32, 35, 50, 59, 105 Irish Volunteers, 57 Isle of Man, 13 J Jackson, Robert Wyse, 106 Jacobites/Jacobitism, 68, 71, 75, 80n12 Jebb, Sharon, 112n2, 114n58 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 136n3 Jenkinson, Rosemary, 135n2 Jews/Jewish, 5, 7, 18n40, 134 Johnson, Samuel, 101, 106, 115n88 Johnston, Denis, 124 Johnston, Jennifer, 124 Jones, Marie, 4 Jordan, Neil, 72 The Crying Game, 72 Joyce, James, 9, 11, 50, 94–96, 111, 117n153, 117n155 “The Dead,” 96 Finnegans Wake, 94 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 95 Ulysses, 94–96 K Keane, Molly (a.k.a. M.J. Farrell and née Mary Nesta Skrine), 124 Kelly, Hugh, 41 Kelly, James, 75 Kiberd, Declan, 54, 107

147

Kildare, County, 38, 125, 129 Kilkenny (city and county), 26, 45n59, 110 Killeen, Jarlath, 6 Kiltartan/Kiltartanese, 66, 77 See also Coole Park; Hiberno-English King, Don W., 90, 112n19 King James Bible, 77 Kipling, Rudyard, 89 L Land League, 53 Landlords, 2–4, 40, 126 Langrishe, Hercules, 36 Laos, 17n28 Lawrence, D.H., 105 Le Fanu, J.S., 126 Leerssen, Joep, 76 Legends, 54, 73, 75, 113n36 Legislative independence, 13, 29, 36 Leixlip, Co. Kildare, 125, 129 Letts, Winifred M., 125 Lewis, C.S., 5, 8, 9, 11, 16n25, 87–111 The Abolition of Man, 97 The Chronicles of Narnia, 88, 105–109, 111, 115n105 The Cosmic Trilogy (his science fiction novels), 105, 106, 111 “Couplets,” 92 C.S. Lewis’s Lost Aeneid: Arms and the Exile, 115n96 “The Dark Tower,” 88 Dymer, 89, 93 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama, 101 essays, 97–99, 101, 102, 105–107 The Four Loves, 96, 97, 102 “Genuine Article,” 96

148 

INDEX

Lewis, C.S. (cont.) The Great Divorce, 88, 97, 103–105 A Grief Observed, 97 “The Hills of Down,” 92, 93, 111 The Horse and His Boy, 105 “How He Saw Angus the God,” 92, 103 “In Praise of Solid People,” 92, 96 “Irish Nocturne,” 91, 92, 100, 111 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 109 The Magician’s Nephew, 106, 111 Mere Christianity, 97, 99, 102 Metrical Meditations of a Cod, 90–92 Miracles, 99 “Pan’s Purge,” 104 Perelandra, 89, 90, 97, 106, 110 A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost,’ 95 The Problem of Pain, 96, 99, 104 “The Roads,” 92, 93 The Screwtape Letters, 97, 103–106, 109 “Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” 96, 109 The Silver Chair, 110 “Spartan Nactus” (a.k.a. “A Confession”), 94 Spirits in Bondage, 90–93, 96, 112n19, 113n44 Surprised By Joy, 88, 104, 107, 110 That Hideous Strength, 89, 100, 107, 110 Till We Have Faces, 105 Ulster novel (untitled, unfinished, and unpublished), 111, 118n56 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 97 The Weight of Glory, 97, 106 The World’s Last Night, 106 Life Force (and “Creative Evolution”), 97–99

Limavady, Co. Derry, 73 Liverpool, 12 Lloyd George, David, 57–58 London, 3, 8, 10, 26–28, 30–35, 38, 40, 41, 44n45, 51, 53, 54, 56, 58, 60n11, 90, 91, 93, 130, 134 Longford, Christine, 38 Tankardstown, 38 Longford, County, 68 Longley, Edna, 5, 10, 13, 124, 134 Longley, Michael, 124 Loyalists/Loyalism, 16n16, 18n38, 135 Luby, Catherine, 75 Lynch, Hannah, 9, 17n30 Lyons, F.S.L., 14n8 M Macardle, Dorothy, 125 Macaulay, Catherine, 78 MacDonald, George, 96, 103, 112n5 Phantastes, 96, 103 Macklin, Charles (né Cathal MacLochlainn), 28, 39, 41, 45n59, 70 The True-Born Irishman, 28, 39 MacNeice, Louis, 110, 117n152 Macpherson, James, 76, 82n52 Mahaffy, J.P., 76 Mahon, Derek, 124 Malaysia, 17n28 Manchester, 12, 59n11 Mangan, James Clarence, 75, 79 Manning, Mary, 125 Marmontel, Jean François, 27 Maturin, Charles, 126 Mayo, County, 117n155 McCormack, W.J., 5, 71 McDiarmid, Lucy, 75–76, 79n3 McFeely, Deirdre, 53, 60n11

 INDEX 

MacGreevy, Thomas, 9, 95 Meath, County, 14n7, 110 Melodrama, 50–52, 55, 60n11, 74, 78 Mercier, Vivien, 5, 15n10 Methodists, see Irish Methodists “Middle nation,” 5, 8, 10, 12–13, 17n28 Milton, John, 91, 95 Modernism/modernist, 89–97 Molyneux, William, 36, 70 Montagu, Elizabeth, 36 Montague, John, 9 Moore, George, 9, 79, 111, 117–118n155 Moore, Thomas, 67 Morgan, Lady, see Owenson, Sydney (a.k.a. Lady Morgan) Morrison, Toni, 55 Morrison, Van, 124, 136n3 Murphy, Arthur, 41 Murphy, Richard, 124 Music, 18n40, 67, 73, 124, 136n3 See also Songs (including hymns) Myanmar, 17n28 Mythology, 66, 73, 75, 82, 92, 93, 104, 113n36, 115n105 N Nabobs, 36, 37 “National character,” 9, 17n31 Ne Temere decree, 131, 137n46 Netherlands/Dutch, 17n28, 54, 56 “New English,” 5, 67 “New Irish,” 4, 12, 135 See also Irish people of colour New York, 52, 60n11, 82n70 New Zealand/New Zealanders, 12, 57 Ní Mhunghaile, Lesa, 71, 76 Nicholson, Mervyn, 110 Nigeria/Nigerian, 12, 14n8, 18n40

149

Nobel Prize for Literature, 89, 92, 139 Northern Ireland (“the six counties”)/ Northern Irish, 8, 9, 11, 14n8, 16n16, 18n39, 110, 111, 124–126, 132, 134, 138n48 O O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 108, 116n134, 116n135 O’Carolan, Turlough, 68, 72 O’Casey, Seán, 2, 4, 45n65, 52 The Plough and the Stars, 45n65 O’Connor, Frank, 56, 79, 117n155 O’Driscoll, Robert, 72 O’Faolain, Julia, 9 Ó Gallchoir, Clíona, 29, 43n9, 43n12 O’Halloran, Sylvester, 69 O’Keeffe, John, 41 “Old English,” 5, 66, 67 See also Anglo-Normans Omagh, Co. Tyrone, 130 See also Tyrone, County O’Neill, Joseph, 110, 111, 117n149, 117n153 Land Under England, 110, 117n149 Orange Order/“Orange” political orientation, 16n16, 132, 133 Orwell, George, 105 Osborn, Marijane, 110 O’Shaughnessy, David, 9, 42n6, 43n9 Owenson, Sydney (a.k.a. Lady Morgan), 67, 68, 71–73, 78 Lady Morgan’s Memoirs, 71 Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies, 71 The Wild Irish Girl, 71, 72 Oxford (city and university), 88, 89, 93, 95, 117n152

150 

INDEX

P Palmer, T.A., 78 Paris, 9, 17n30, 40, 94 Parker, Stewart, 4, 53, 60n16, 124 Heavenly Bodies, 60n16 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 2, 131 Patagonia, 36 Pearce, Joseph, 99 Pearse, Patrick H., 50 Penal Laws, 5, 9, 10 Pepys, Samuel, 78 Percy, Thomas, 79n4 Pine, Emilie, 124 “Planters”/plantation settlers, 67, 124 See also “New English” Plunkett, Joseph Mary, 111, 117n155 Poland/Polish, 12 Portarlington, Co. Laois, 26, 27, 32 Postcolonial theory/critics, 8, 13, 17n27, 50, 59n5 See also Colonialism; Hybridity Power, Edward, 110 Prelapsarian, 106 Presbyterians, see Ulster Scots Presbyterians Protestants/Protestantism, 2, 4–7, 9–13, 14n8, 14n9, 15n10, 15n11, 15–16n16, 17n30, 18n38, 28, 50, 68, 74, 80n14, 93, 96, 117–118n155, 130–135, 135n2, 137n42, 137n48, 138n54 See also Church of England; Church of Ireland; Evangelicals/ Evangelicalism; Irish Methodists; Irish Quakers; Ulster Scots Presbyterians Public schools (English/British), 10, 56, 76, 88, 130 Q Quakers, see Irish Quakers Quinn, Bob, 18n40

R “Race” and ethnicity, 3–4, 12, 17n28, 18n40, 33, 37, 38, 55, 69, 112, 126, 127, 134, 135 Rebellion/Rising of 1798, 9, 71, 75 Reid, Christina, 4 Reid, Forrest, 110, 111, 112n2, 117n152, 117n153 Reid, Graham, 4 Republicans/Republicanism (Irish), 2, 10, 16n16, 51, 56, 58, 59 Republic of Ireland, see Irish Free State/Republic (“the twenty-six counties”), 2 Reynolds, Joshua, 36 Richardson, Samuel, 78 Rizzo, Betty, 29, 42n6 Rodgers, Vincentia, 75 Roman Catholics/Roman Catholicism, 2, 5, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16n16, 17n30, 67, 69, 71, 75, 80n13, 101, 117n153, 117–118n155, 125, 127, 129–134, 137n48 See also Irish Gaelic Catholics Ross, Ian Campbell, 31 Ross, Martin (née Violet F. Martin), 3, 9, 53, 80n14 The Big House of Inver, 69 Royal Dublin Showgrounds (RDS), 126, 128 S Sagas, 69, 76, 77, 82n52, 92 See also Fenian Cycle; Legends; Mythology; Ulster Cycle Satire/satirical, 37, 39, 40, 50–52, 54, 55, 57–59 Scotland/Scottish, 2, 6, 10, 13, 16n24, 18n39, 19n42, 37, 76, 82n52, 103, 111, 112n5, 135 Scott, Sir Walter, 79, 112n5 Seanad Éireann, 131

 INDEX 

Shakespeare, William, 28, 77, 101, 108 Shaw, (George) Bernard, 2, 7, 11, 26, 31, 33, 37, 41, 44n52, 50, 52, 53, 66, 72, 97–104, 109, 111, 115n96 Androcles and the Lion, 99 Arms and the Man, 115n96 Back to Methuselah (play cycle), 98, 99, 111 The Doctor’s Dilemma, 99, 101, 102, 111 Fanny’s First Play, 99, 102, 111, 115n96 Getting Married, 99, 102 Heartbreak House, 33 John Bull’s Other Island, 38, 72, 97, 99–101, 111 Love Among the Artists, 97 Man and Superman, 99, 103, 111 Saint Joan, 99 The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, 115n96 Village Wooing, 33 You Never Can Tell, 33 Sheridan, Elizabeth, 31 The Triumph of Passion over Prudence, 31 Sheridan, Frances, 32, 41, 43n27, 70 A Trip to Bath, 32, 43n27 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 2, 6, 7, 26, 32, 39, 41, 50, 70 St. Patrick’s Day, 32 The Rivals, 32 The School for Scandal, 39 Sheridan, Thomas, 26, 28, 41, 70 The Brave Irishman, 28 Singapore, 17n28 Sligo, County, 54, 93 Smith, Sandy, 112n2 Smock Alley Theatre, 26, 28, 31

151

Social class, 2–6, 10, 14n9, 15n12, 26, 28–29, 31, 33, 37, 40, 53, 54, 66–71, 73–76, 78–79, 81n33, 93, 96, 114n53, 123–139 aristocracy/gentry/upper class, 1–6, 10, 14n9, 15n12, 26, 28, 31, 33, 37, 40, 54, 66–69, 73–76, 78–79, 81n33, 93, 124, 126–130, 132–134, 137n32, 137n42 (see also Big House; Landlords) middle class/bourgeoisie, 2, 4, 14n9, 28, 31, 66, 96, 114n53, 124, 126–130, 132, 134, 137n32, 137n42 working class/tenantry/lower class, 2–4, 14n9, 28–29, 53, 66–70, 76, 124, 126–128, 130, 132–134, 137n42 Socialists/socialism, 2, 97 Somerville, Edith Œ., 3, 7, 9, 16n24, 53, 69, 80n14, 125 The Big House of Inver, 69 Songs (including hymns), 60n11, 67–69, 71, 72, 76, 77, 124, 136n3, 136n23 Southerne, Thomas, 30, 41 Southey, Robert, 78 Spain/Spanish, 18n30, 32 Spenser, Edmund, 101, 108 Sport, 13, 18n40, 19n42, 56 See also Gaelic Athletic Association Sri Lanka, 17n28 St. John, Mary, 75 St. Peter, Christine, 125, 126 Stage English characters, 38, 54–55 Stage Irish characters, 28, 52, 53, 60n11 Steele, Sarah, 75

152 

INDEX

Steele, Sir Richard, 7, 37, 41, 44n47, 70 The Conscious Lovers, 37 Stephens, James, 4, 14n7, 96, 103–104, 111, 115n102 The Crock of Gold, 96, 103, 104, 115n102 Deirdre, 104 The Demi-Gods, 104 Here Are Ladies, 104 Sterne, Laurence, 11, 70, 109–110, 117n141, 117n143 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 109–110 Stoker, Abraham “Bram,” 8, 50–59, 110 Dracula, 50, 54, 110 The Snake’s Pass, 50, 54, 55 Stream-of-consciousness, 95 Swift, Jonathan, 6, 7, 11, 29, 36, 49, 50, 70, 104–107, 109, 112n2, 116n116, 131 The Battle of the Books, 106 Gulliver’s Travels, 104–106 Synge, J. M., 9, 50, 52, 77, 79, 128 “A Landlord’s Garden in County Wicklow,” 128 T Texas/Texan, 54 Thompson, Sam, 4 Tipperary, County, 109 Tolkein, J. R. R., 115n105 Tracy, Robert, 5, 72, 81n33 Trevor, William, 50, 55, 58, 124 Trinity College Dublin, 2, 76, 106, 125, 129, 138n67 Trotter, David, 56 Tuam, Co. Galway, 110 Turgenev, Ivan, 79 Turner, Juliet, 136n3 Tyrone, County, 130, 136n3

U Ulster, 4, 8, 10–12, 18n38, 56, 73, 111, 132–135, 135n2 Ulster Cycle, 70, 75, 76, 92, 113n36 See also Legends; Mythology; Sagas Ulster Scots (language)/Ullans, 10 Ulster Scots Presbyterians, 4, 9–11, 16n16, 73, 111, 117n153, 132–133, 135, 135n2 Unionists/Unionism, 4, 10–13, 16n16, 18n38, 18n39, 56, 57, 66, 79n3, 135, 138n48 United Kingdom, 6, 8, 52, 58, 135 United States of America/American, 2, 6, 12, 51, 55, 57, 60n11, 93, 94 See also Texas/Texan Ussher (or Usher), James, 70 V Valente, Joe, 79n3 Vaughan, Henry, 112n5 Victorian (era and morals), 50, 66, 76–78, 129 Vietnam/Vietnamese, 8, 12, 17n28 Virgil, 115n96 Vivisection, 101–102 W Waddell, Helen, 110, 111, 117n152, 117n153 #WakingTheFeminists (WTF), 41, 45n65 Wales/Welsh, 2, 6, 10, 13, 18n39, 18n40, 26, 32, 33, 35, 36, 111, 112n5, 135 Walker, J. C., 73 Ward, Michael, 88, 109 Waters, Maureen, 76 Welch, Robert, 35, 67, 76, 77 West, Michael, 124

 INDEX 

“West Brit”/“West Britonism,” 13, 134 See also Britishness; Hybridity West of Ireland, 55, 91, 93 White, Ali, 45n65 Wicklow, County, 52, 56, 128 See also Glendalough, Co. Wicklow Wilde, Oscar, 2, 9, 11, 25, 26, 33, 39, 41, 50, 109 “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” 109 De Profundis, 109 The Importance of Being Earnest, 33, 109 “The Selfish Giant,” 109 Wilson, A. N., 89, 97 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 108, 116n134 Woods, Ellen, 78 Wordsworth, William, 88

153

World War I (a.k.a. the Great War), 57–58, 90 World War II (a.k.a. the Emergency), 102, 133 Y Yeats, W. B., 2, 11, 50, 69, 77, 79, 89–97, 103, 104, 111, 113n44, 128, 131 “Ancestral Houses,” 128 Cathleen ni Houlihan (co-written with Lady Gregory), 79 “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” 91 “No Second Troy,” 113n44 Purgatory, 69, 93 “The Stolen Child,” 91 Yorkshire, 32, 45n59 Young Irelanders, 67