Irish Literature

Comings and Goings

The ‘isolated and outlandish’ domain of the doomed Big House gentry

Irish Literature

A Marlowe from Mayo

In the rural Ireland of the 1920s memories of the War of Independence and Civil War are still strong. The Garda Síochána stands at the…

A Moment of Slackness

The characters in a 1946 collection of Mary Lavin’s stories, now republished, are cramped by the pressure to be respectable, to be of account in…

Irish Literature

Skimming the Cream off the Orphans’ Milk

Gerald O’Donovan left the priesthood due to strained relations with his conservative and philistine bishop. In his novel about the fortunes of the provincial middle…

World Literature

Their Own Medicine

Matthew Pearl’s 2003 bestseller ‘The Dante Club’ is set at the close of the American Civil War when Boston is shaken by a series of…

Irish Literature

A Terrible Thing

Iris Murdoch’s Easter 1916 novel ‘The Red and the Green’ (1965) expresses some of her own early Marxist and feminist attitudes, as when a character…

Irish History

A Cooling Cinder

A fictional portrait of Dublin in the years leading up to the Great War and 1916 is brimming with ideas and has a great deal…

Irish History

Awkward Voices

A new biographical study focuses on four nationalist intellectuals who at first seemed to support the Easter Rising and the War of Independence but afterwards…

Irish Literature

Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang

The first of a series of essays on fictions inspired by the 1916 Easter Rising looks at a work by Raymond Queneau, a French disciple…