“It Was a Smoke Dream”: Affective Aesthetics in Women’s Literature of the Irish Civil War

Abstract

The formal, ideological, and narrative elements constituting the aesthetics of hope and disappointment in women’s writing of the Irish revolution offer new insights into the gendered experience of conflict. By arguing that women’s writing in this period complicates and expands existing classifications of conflict literature, this paper proposes to trace a network of alternative connection, built out of subjective gendered experiences of political and social upheaval. Drawing on theories of affect and emotion with reference to Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House (1938), Margaret Barrington’s My Cousin Justin (1939) and Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited (1942), this article suggests that appraisal of textual interconnection can thicken our understanding of the conceptual tools engaged by women writers to record, relay, and refract the personal and political implications of early-twentieth century Ireland.

1. “My Energy Had All Gone into One Channel”: Sketching Women’s Networks in the Emergent Free State

By the 1930s, the energies of the Irish women’s republican movement had, for many of the female actors, distilled into international activism and into creative outputs that depict the complexities of the period and its aftermath. Linked through the Radical Club and the Irish Women Writers’ Club, as well as through their experience of, involvement in, and connections to the revolutionary period, the fictional outputs of Rosamond Jacob, Margaret Barrington, and Dorothy Macardle can be seen to contribute to the emergence of what Gerardine Meaney (2018) identifies as the “exhausted discontent” of literature in this period. While documented direct interactions between these writers are referenced here, this paper is more explicitly concerned with tracing the networks that are forged on the page, through their artistic output that documents aesthetic responses to an ideological moment. In doing so, I address the work of three novelists whose varying levels of literary obscurity illustrate the trajectory of erasure and recovery for women writers in early-twentieth century Ireland.

While her reputation as an activist, journalist, and political commentator was established throughout her life, Dorothy Macardle’s literary work had fallen from wider public attention until the reissuing of The Uninvited (Macardle [1942] 2015) and The Unforeseen (Macardle [1946] 2017) as part of Tramp Press’s Recovered Voices series from 2015, as well as Earth-bound: And Other Supernatural Tales (Macardle [1924] 2020) which was republished by Swan River Press in 2020. Rosamond Jacob’s extensive diaries have provided contextual information for multiple studies of the revolutionary period, and she is the subject of a biography by Leann Lane, published in 2010; her novels, however, remain out of print, despite having attracted some scholarly attention in recent years (Meaney 2011; Steele 2011; Backus 1999; Brady 2007). In contrast to relatively substantial archival and journalistic material left by Jacob and Macardle, Margaret Barrington is a far more elusive figure. The story “Village Without Men” was included in Sinéad Gleeson’s (2020) anthology The Art of the Glimpse: in fact, the title of the anthology is taken from a review from William Trevor of Barrington’s work. Her writings, literary and journalistic, remain difficult but not impossible to locate, particularly since My Cousin Justin was reissued by Blackstaff Press in 1990. However, the longstanding challenge of accessing Irish women writers’ work evidently persists as an issue both of visibility and accessibility.

In framing this article, however, I wish to draw on Susan Harris’s concept of “recovery work” that moves beyond the act of retrieval (which is nonetheless essential) and into the space of analysis “through an equally broad compendium of theoretical perspectives, cultural contexts, transatlantic contexts, interdisciplinary contexts, and print and production contexts” (Harris 2009). This paper proposes to unearth the shared foundations from which these literary responses derive, thereby tracing an alternative kind of network in which these and other women writers participated: a network of hope and disappointment, of radical imagination and frustrated ambition. In thinking about what characterises networks, and how to evidence networks, one is confronted with a muffling of the work of women writers whose work and lives fall beyond the “canonical fraction” of mainstream, masculine literature (Moretti 2000). By drawing these three women writers together, whose lives touched off each other and whose work speaks out of a shared experience, I propose that an intellectual and imaginative network, predicated on the supratextual relational contexts of the period, can be mapped through the textual and subtextual characteristics of their literary work. As Meaney (2004) points out, “[o]ne does not really need to see photographic and newspaper evidence (though it helps) of Jacob, O’Brien, Macardle and Sheehy Skeffington sitting down to dinners and awards ceremonies together to postulate a critical culture that was woman-centred, dissident, active and well aware of its political limitations”. The spectrum and subtleties of historical erasure play out for these women in different ways—Macardle’s archive was burned on her death; Jacob’s journals remain intact but her literary work is obsolete; Barrington has been obscured by the reputation of her husband—but a reconsideration of what constitutes connections for women’s writing to include conceptual as well as interpersonal networks can open new spaces for interpreting historical moments from women’s perspectives. To quote Porter (2010), “[b]ecause the record of women’s activities often is dismissed or ignored by the masculinist historical record, even their creative and independent achievements—to say nothing of their influence on society—are obscured and forgotten”. This article argues that by recognising and theorising how this crucial period of transition in modern Ireland is dealt with by women writers of the time (and indeed how the emergent modern Ireland treated women writers), the origins of the quiet subversions of Irish women’s writing throughout the twentieth century come into view.

This essay, therefore, proposes to trace the shared aesthetics of hope and disappointment in these novels, which emerge from the writers’ own involvement in and discontent with the politics of the moment. In this, I refer to Sianne Ngai’s theory of “ugly feelings” as subordinate emotions, or in her terms “affects”, that attract less attention than the headline responses of bombastic emotion, such as anger, rage and passion (Ngai 2007). Ngai argues that subordinate affects are associated with the “minor canon” of literature, as well as with “weakly intentional feelings” appropriate to “situations marked by blocked or thwarted action in particular”. In this way, Ngai’s theory is eminently applicable to the specific emotional context of women’s literature in the emerging Free State, marked as it is by an abiding sense of frustrated ambition and by the vista of a possible egalitarian future briefly glimpsed before being lost. Ngai further suggests that “there is a sense in which ugly feelings can be described as conducive to producing ironic distance in a way that the grander and more prestigious passions, or even the moral emotions associated with sentimental literature, do not”. The distancing enabled by the affect of hope-turned-disappointment creates a chilly counterpoint to the kinds of ‘grander’ declarations characterising the horrors of war even in its complexity, such as in works by O’Connor, O’Flaherty, and O’Malley. Using the lens of ugly feelings, specifically the gendered dialectic of hope-turned-disappointment, allows us “to examine the politically ambiguous work of negative emotions” that defines the literature of the period, particularly for these activists whose commitment to republican socialist feminist causes was not rewarded in the emergent Free State.

Cultural historians of this period (Ní Bheacháin 2012; Dawson 2017) have drawn on Raymond Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” to interrogate the subcultural specifics in circulation. As Williams (1977) notes, these structures develop through “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships” that are “substantially alternative or oppositional to [the dominant culture]”. Merging Ngai’s affect theory with Williams’ network theory offers a new critical paradigm that can register the fundamentally alternative position of women’s writing in the period, as well as deepening our understanding of the trajectory of feminist and socialist desire for the promise of revolutionary transformation before collapsing into disappointment. The rhetoric of possibility and its textual silencing connects these works and these writers, through the gendered subjectivity of the motifs and structures of hope and disappointment that play out in these novels. In the arc of optimism and disillusionment linking female political and cultural actors in the period, disappointment presupposes expectation and brings an interruptive energy before breaking down into debilitation which is instantiated by the incapacitation of female characters in the novels. Disappointment can be considered as one of Sianne Ngai’s ugly feelings, fitting into the rubric of “unprestigious” responses that are “the site and stake of various kinds of symbolic struggle”. If, as Joanna Bourke (2003) asserts, “emotions are an expression of power relations”, we can read the literary representation of disappointment, and its precursor hope, as a gendered space within which resistance, agency, submission and/or subjugation are asserted. In particular, ugly feelings open space to articulate taboo emotions, thereby allowing space for Irish women writers to subvert gendered expectations around femininity and proper womanhood already permeating the increasingly conservative Catholic Irish state. This paper reflects on how the spectrum of promise from anticipation to failure in these novels is also a mapping of possibility as it peaks and dies in its historical moment, as narrated by these writers who were also political activists committed to a new vision for Ireland. By interrogating the textures of hope and disappointment as fabricated in these novels, this paper suggests new ways of reading within and across texts of the period, in order both to bring under-read novels into view and to deepen and complicate our understanding of aesthetic and affective development of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing.

Dorothy Macardle, Rosamond Jacob, and Margaret Barrington are part of what Katrina Goldstone describes as a “disparate yet connected group of activists and writers” who “created their own national and international affiliations to disrupt patriarchal strictures in both social and cultural spheres” (Goldstone 2020). They are connected not only through their interpersonal relationships and links to cultural groups, but also through their activism. Although the specifics of their politics differ, and the nature of their activist work varies, all three women were immersed in social, political, and cultural agitation for change, and their activism continued beyond the Irish context, through involvement in anti-fascist campaigns, refugee work, and journalistic contributions. While those international humanitarian commitments are beyond the scope of this paper, it is instructive to situate these three novelists within a broader sphere of rights-based activism, not least to reflect on the roots of those later energies.

2. “There Will Probably Be More Like Her, as Time Goes On”: Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House

Rosamond Jacob’s detailed diaries have long been pillaged as a source for eyewitness accounts of events on Dublin city streets during the Rising and subsequent conflict. Until Leann Lane’s authoritative biography, however, published in 2010, Jacob’s own life and her literary work had been relegated to the shadow cast of this period. Like many in the ensemble of female actors in the 1920s and beyond, Jacob’s “ordinariness” was characterised by lifelong feminism, activism, and cultural participation. The relationship between Dorothy Macardle and Rosamond Jacob is well-documented, both in their extant papers and publications and in their biographies (Lane 2010, 2019; Smith 2007). Macardle and Jacob shared a cell in Mountjoy Prison in January 1923, and later became housemates and friends. Unlike Macardle, whose cultural capital endured throughout her life, Jacob struggled to find a publisher or consistent paid work in her lifetime, which was a cause of frustration and disappointment. She was nevertheless well-travelled, however, with transnational links that brought her to London and Russia during her lifetime. Katrina Goldstone (2020) observes how Irish women “circumvented… cultural barriers [by] moving in international suffrage or anti-fascist circles or seeking professional opportunities and outlets for creativity beyond Irish shores”, and this offers another way of tracing the “contours of the radical cartographies of these friendship networks” involving Jacob, Macardle and Margaret Barrington, along with many others.

Although not published until 1938, Jacob’s The Troubled House was first drafted in 1923 and it bears the marks of hope as yet undashed, replete with feminist possibility, “new woman”-hood and sexual liberation that would become unimaginable in the Free State. Meaney (2011) suggests that the novel offers “a sense of historical possibilities lost” and indeed The Troubled House can be read as a blueprint of optimism for potential ways of living that would not be realised. As a work which accepts non-conformist lifestyles, the novel does not shy away from the rancour and misery of conflict and its impacts on individuals, families, and communities, as experienced by Jacob during the War of Independence and Civil War. In many ways, this novel can be read as a prequel of sorts to later feminist works which document the frustrated ambition and deep disillusionment of post-revolutionary Ireland. Although the novel ends before the outbreak of the Civil War, the entire narrative is inflected with the reader’s knowledge of what lies ahead. While it is not clear what, if any, edits were undertaken by Jacob before the novel’s ultimate publication in 1938, it is difficult to read the work without perceiving flashes of anticipation of the divisive disappointments of the subsequent years.

The Troubled House opens with Margaret Cullen at sea, returning from a number of years in Australia where she had been caregiving for her ill sister. From its outset, situating Margaret as beyond the familial, domestic, and national sphere, the novel pushes at the traditionally encoded boundaries of the domestic space for women. Margaret’s three-year long absence from her husband and children, in order to look after her sister and enable her niece to continue her education, lends her some distance to consider the increasingly bitter conflict playing out on political and private stages on her return to Ireland. The novel proceeds to document family, political, and feminist shifts against the backdrop of the War of Independence, which enthralls and damages Margaret, her husband Jim, their three young-adult sons Theo, Roddy, and Liam, and their wider community in Dublin. The eclectic, urbane, and politically engaged community depicted in the novel certainly is not utopian, but it undoubtedly depicts a version of Jacob’s Dublin, and “the artistic, sexual, spiritual, and political demi-monde to which the Irish State in part owes its existence” (Backus 1999).

Jacob’s subversive emphasis on alternative lifestyles and individual identities is threaded throughout the book, as is the coexistence of differing political positions which are initially proposed as possibilities for an independent future. While Margaret does not necessarily agree with the republican movement at the outset, she is nevertheless prepared to consider its merits, unlike her husband Jim, a Catholic Unionist, who comes from “the same old Home Rule standpoint as ever”. Possibility pervades the novel, even despite the violence and disruption—the prospect of individual and collective self-realisation motivates hope in The Troubled House. In his mother’s eyes. Theo, the pacifist in the family, has “a hopeful idealism very becoming at his age, and also, I thought, a touch of originality”; Margaret articulates a similar hope for her youngest son: “I want you to grow up with a free mind, not one that’s been hardened and bent in a certain direction”. Towards the end of the novel, she explicitly states that the worst of all conditions is to “be… tame under the tyranny of accepted values”. In a revealing passage, Margaret Cullen understands that the cause of the widening rift between Jim Cullen and his sons Theo, Roddy, and Liam, is exacerbated by their differing political positions but is rooted in a more fundamental denial of individual autonomy. “In spite of his love for Theo and Roddy, and of Theo’s love for him, he had never had their full confidence because he had never admitted their rights as individual souls”. When Jim is ultimately shot dead by Liam, in an act of unwitting and devastating patricide that surely foreshadows the intimate social discord imminent in the Civil War, Jim’s deathbed words acknowledge his son’s autonomy and the necessity of living by one’s convictions. The certainty of the right to self-determination is both the premise and the cause of hope in the novel, even through the ugly feelings of envy, resentment, discord, and disability that undercut the hopeful notes at different points in the novel. The occasion of a raid corporealizes the experience of frustrated energy for Margaret:

The sense of utter defenselessness, the blinding, sickening, freezing terror which must be controlled because there was nowhere any possibility of help, I shall always shiver to recall, and through it I was half-consciously aware that once, somewhere, it had happened to me before[.]

(Jacob 1938, p. 146)

Restricted behaviour introduces the specifically gendered dimension of possibility, which is crucial to The Troubled House. Margaret’s early reflection on her life spent duly doing her maternal and spousal duty suggests dissatisfaction with existing gender roles that informs the hope for a new future: she asks “[w]as I nothing but being relative to them, without real existence of my own?” The promised new Ireland offers the possibility of a different ideology, beyond the relativity and interdependence of female existence contingent on a relationship to a man. For Jacob, like many of her activist and artistic peers, the promise of a feminist future was as urgent as the promise of a republican society.

The drive for a society that would hold space for individuals such as the character of Nix Oglivie is implied through Nix’s resistance to existing normative values, which offers an image of an alternative lifestyle that is accepted as part of the new Ireland. When Margaret muses, “I suppose there will be more like her, as time goes on”, she speaks to Nix’s sexuality, her sexual liberation, her commitment to her art and her totally non-conformative behaviour, all of which seem to beguile the members of the Cullen family in different ways. Nix herself is entirely unselfconscious about her own desires and priorities: upon realising the “new and dreadful threat” to her art in a raid, she conjures her work as equally precious as a child. Rallying herself to comfort Margaret, Nix comments “[t]here, don’t worry! I suppose it would be worse you to lose Liam than for me to lose pictures—or as bad, anyway.” Nix’s powerful embodied mourning when her art is later destroyed (an event based loosely on the burning of Macardle’s papers) redistributes the hierarchy of conflict grief to accommodate different values—Nix is allowed to mourn for her art because her art is important, even if this emotional response might be coded as selfish, an ugly feeling, in the canonical framing of the literature of conflict which designates women to supporting roles in a male narrative. “I wish to God they tore you into shreds before they touched my pictures” she curses Liam, as she is transformed by her grief: “her figure was tense with fury, her hands were clenched, her voice was scarcely human, and the atmosphere was electric with the intensity of her passion. On the floor between them a heap of canvases lay, hacked and torn to rags.” The figure of Nix has been recognised as a modernist figure in The Troubled House, embodying the movement’s linkage “between sexual dissidence and aesthetic freedom”, and totally eschewing normative expectations of female behaviour (Meaney 2004).

The destruction of Nix’s paintings is therefore also an implicit and ominous threat to difference. Nix’s art is primed with newness—she is painting in the Cubist style, addressing “[t]he possibilities of men”, “for the love of… beauty”, and “for the sake of the picture”. Margaret glimpses a painting in Nix’s studio of two of her sons posed on opposite sides of a chess board, which disturbs her and yet compels her, becoming “queerer and more fascinating every moment”. Through Nix, the novel undertakes what Meaney (2004) calls “transgressive looking”, introducing a kind of seductive frisson into the regard of art. In The Troubled House, Jacob depicts a society enthralled by possibility that is laced with potential disappointment. Nix’s “freakish” portrait of Liam and Theo locks the two men in a battle on canvas over a game of chess, a neat analogy for the imminent civil war. When the painting is destroyed in a raid, the possibilities of art to reframe or even redeem ugly feelings are punctured too. Just as Margaret initially regards the painting with horror and then with fascination, the novel presents to the reader a portrait of a beguiling emergent society which is never fully realised. In capturing this distinctive moment in the trajectory of possibility and disappointment in the literature of the revolutionary period, The Troubled House forms part of the alternative archive of women’s writing that documents a distinctly female experience of conflict and its consequences in early 20th-century Ireland.

3. “I Just Hate What I See Coming”—Margaret Barrington’s My Cousin Justin

The near-impossibility of locating Margaret Barrington in the archives is indicative of the ways in which erasure occurs, as well as emphasising the need to develop alternative methods of tracing cartographies of connection. Despite minor evidence of her attendance at the Radical Club, her literary output and her links to English and European cultural circles, Barrington’s archival imprint is extremely faint and she is found mostly in passing reference in works relating to her ex-husband Liam O’Flaherty or in others’ letters and unpublished memoirs, as suggested in Katrina Goldstone’s Irish Writers and the Thirties. Born in 1896 in Donegal, as the child of an RIC constable, Barrington spent much of her childhood moving around but remained connected to Co. Donegal through her maternal grandfather, with whom she spent time in Malin. Barrington’s university education took place at Trinity College Dublin, from where she graduated with a degree in Modern Languages in 1918. She lived in Dublin until the mid-1920s, deeply involved in the literary circles of the moment through which she met Liam O’Flaherty in 1924. The relationship between Barrington and O’Flaherty was cause of some scandal at the time, because Barrington was married to Trinity academic Edward Curtis when she eloped with O’Flaherty, with whom she had one child in 1926. George Jefferson (1993) describes their relationship as “a marriage that had to weather the vicissitudes of O’Flaherty’s restless temperament and roving disposition, a neuroticism aggravated by his war-time experiences and careless regard for money”. Despite falling from the cultural record, Barrington led a remarkable life as a radical activist and writer. Her involvement in Irish letters stretches from 1924, when her short story “Colour” was published in the first issue of Francis Stuart’s journal To-morrow alongside work by W.B. Yeats, Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, and O’Flaherty, through to regular reviews and fiction published in The Bell. Her novel My Cousin Justin was published in 1939, and republished as a Virago modern classic in 1990, while a collection of short stories David’s Daughter Tamar was posthumously published in 1982. As Katrina Goldstone (2020) and Maurice Casey (2020) have documented, Barrington’s Irish and British cultural networks are registered mostly through other people’s accounts, but even these shadows of a life convey Barrington’s lifelong political engagement.

Barrington’s life was defined by her commitment to left-wing politics, including housing refugees from fascist Spain in London and undertaking translation work to support socialist causes (Casey 2020). These radical roots are earthed in her time as a student in Trinity College Dublin during the Easter Rising, and her involvement with the emergent radical social scene in Dublin, which “had echoes of the subversive and avant-garde culture more commonly associated with cities like Berlin and Moscow” (Goldstone 2020). Through Rosamond Jacob’s diaries, we have an insight into the events of the Radical Club, established in 1925 by Liam O’Flaherty, and attended by Barrington as well as by Jacob, demonstrating the cultural intersections in literary and artistic circles in the period. (Trench 2019). While the timelines, club memberships, and activist commitments all suggest Barrington’s participation in the cultural networks of the period, the absence of a coherent archive makes it difficult to trace precise interactions between Barrington and her peers. However, as I suggest above, siting her literary work in conversation, and even in continuum, with other publications of the time opens unto an alternative archive of collective experience muffled by time. Barrington’s novel My Cousin Justin facilitates a further mapping of the aesthetic register of radical optimism and subsequent disappointment shared with Jacob and Macardle. Written during the 1930s and published in 1939, Barrington’s novel considers a similar timeframe to The Troubled House, although it continues beyond the Civil War. My Cousin Justin tells the story of Loulie Delahaie, a young Anglo-Irish woman from the north of Ireland who finds herself enmeshed in revolutionary politics while studying, living, and working in Dublin during the Easter Rising and afterwards. The narrative is inflected by her relationships with her cousin Justin Thorauld, who fights in the First World War, and Egan O’Doherty, a childhood neighbour, a committed republican and, eventually for a troubled period, her husband. This novel bears clear resemblance to Barrington’s own life, and her relationship with O’Flaherty. This tendency towards fictionalised testimony of experiences during this period has been documented by Síobhra Aiken (2022) as a kind of historical sub-archive that yields valuable detail about the revolution and the submerged traumatic experiences of its participants and witnesses. This interspace of fictional and biographical expression is suggestive of the ways in which literary texts might fruitfully yield new ways of reading the historical past through attention to the affective registers.

To read Barrington’s My Cousin Justin (Barrington 1939) through the lens of “intimate violence”—that is, the intersection of domestic and military abuse that locates itself in its treatment of women—is to gain an insight into women’s lives and the pernicious nature of misogyny in the period. Barrington’s novel documents the tensions of selfhood and socialist belief against a backdrop of a deeply personal rendering of Barrington’s life and depicts the various ways in which the perpetrator, Loulie, is subject to the textured violence of conflict—violence that encompasses family rupture; community mistrust; personal exploitation; political disappointment; verbal aggression; and ultimately, an invalidation of female independence. Linking the macro acts of military aggression to the localised experiences of Loulie (and other female characters in the novel) exposes the particularly gendered implications of restricting the temporal and spatial boundaries of conflict’s reach, while simultaneously illustrating the complex dynamic of power, autonomy, and control at play during the period. Loulie’s individual disappointments are intertwined between the personal and the political, her dejection at the abandonment of the socialist idyll is intensified by her marital breakdown, and ultimately the failure of the socialist and feminist ideologies which sees the novel end back where it began, in Loulie’s ancestral home on the north coast of Ireland.

As in The Troubled House, sheltering on-the-runs brings erotic possibilities, manifested in Barrington’s novel when Loulie realises the rebel shimmying silently through her skylight is in fact her childhood neighbour Egan O’Doherty. In conversations with the rebel organiser Tom Hennessy, however, the ugly feeling of resignation that permeates the novel is made clear. Speaking about what lies at the end of the Civil War, Loulie’s exhaustion is evident: “I just hate what I see coming. It will put back what we both want for generations. We hoped that out of this struggle the working class would seize power. It was a smoke dream. Free State or Republic, what does it matter?” In Barrington’s novel, disappointment here is the product of frustrated hope, its affect deflation and exhaustion on collective as well as individual levels, with “the mass of the people […] tired and apathetic”. The love affair between Loulie and Egan seems destined for disappointment from the moment of their engagement—the lovers quote medieval Irish poetry to each other, Egan choosing Robin Flower’s translation of “At Mass”, a poem depicting a man’s psychological struggle between religion and love while Loulie recites a version of ‘Donal Óg’, an eighth-century love poem and lament from the perspective of a woman abandoned by her lover.

The recitation proves premonitory and, after a brief but excruciating marriage marked by financial, romantic, and social humiliation, Loulie is reunited with Justin and returns to the family home in Donegal.1 Loulie is ostensibly comforted but yet disturbed by the stifling stasis of the place: “Old books, old loves, dead as autumn leaves. I shivered. The old house was full of ghosts.” Despite the novel’s efforts to realise an alternative future for Loulie and for the nation, through a “mixed marriage” and radical political activism, My Cousin Justin concludes with Loulie’s permanent retreat to her familial Big House, where divisions once thought amenable to a new united future are re-entrenched in the aftermath of the Civil War. As Justin and Egan engage in a bizarre final evening, their shared experience of the brutalities of war in Ireland and in France initially bonds them before it breaks them apart when they broach the topic of Egan’s murder of Justin’s ex-wife. The political becomes personal, and Loulie watches on, frightened of the inevitability of what lies ahead—the conclusive loss of her husband, the dissolution of an imagined socialist republic, and the definitive ruptures of the post-Civil War climate that leaves Loulie and her class very much on the wrong side of history. In a series of disappointments that dampen the end of the novel, Loulie relinquishes her hopes of a new life by selling the ancestral home, and instead surrenders to the inescapable power of the house, which is simultaneously the prospectus for the imminent Irish Free State: “shuttered”, “dark”, and “oppressive”. Recognising that “[t]here was nothing to be done now but to accept defeat” in terms of her relationship with Egan, Loulie is also implicitly acknowledging the thwarted ambition of her own political and ideological aspirations. Finally, she cedes her autonomy, and accepts that “[t]his house did not belong to me but I to it.” The final thought that flutters across the narrative is perhaps the most ominous of all—upon hearing Justin turn the key in his bedroom door, Loulie muses “Why did he lock his door in this friendly place where no one locked doors?” Like all the other erasures played out in this novel, this symbolic loss of trust suggests that the emergent political and social climate will be a cold house for Loulie as a socialist, Anglo-Irish woman.

From the energies of Loulie’s participation in the struggle for a socialist republic through the humiliations of her personal disillusionment, My Cousin Justin documents the difficult, ugly, and rarely recalled beginnings of the post-revolutionary society through a gendered lens that positions the limitations of female agency at its centre. The closing scene, wherein home is finally understood as no longer what it used to be for Loulie, delivers the final blow in this novel of disappointments. Indeed, the locked door might also be read as signifying the literary establishment for women more generally, as the unpleasant thematic trajectory of hope-into-disappointment depicted in My Cousin Justin also implies a plethora of other thwarted ambitions, as Ngai suggests. Barrington’s novel travels with Jacob’s The Troubled House in its depiction of the specifics of the conflict events, and then moves forward into the “politically ambiguous” aftermath. In imaginatively partnering the ugly compromises of Loulie’s life with the political compromises of the emergent Free State, the recovery of Barrington’s novel through the rubric of ugly feelings offers another staging post in a revised understanding of the evolution of twentieth-century Irish women’s writing as a dossier of dissent.

4. “This Situation Was Atrocious: It Could Not Go On”—Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited

Dorothy Macardle’s reputation in the intersecting political, cultural, and feminist networks of the period is well-established. With her privileged background, high level of education, and cultural fluency, Macardle was a well-regarded journalist and writer throughout her lifetime, operating within multiple spheres of influence at various points. Her membership of Cumann na mBan, her active participation throughout the revolutionary period including a period of imprisonment during the Civil War, her association with Eamonn deValera and Fianna Fáil, and her ultimate disillusionment at the failure to realise the republican ideals are all well-documented in biographies by Nadia Clare Smith and Leann Lane. Macardle was a relatively powerful figure at the time, “with connections to the higher ranks of national and international governments” and exerting influence within the circles of the Irish Women Writers’ Club for the duration of its existence from 1933 to 1958 (Brady 2021). Despite this, her literary contributions were almost completely erased, possibly due to the subversive, discomfiting narratives she published in her later years, which comment obliquely on the new Irish state.

In 1937, Macardle wrote to Eamon de Valera about the proposed wording of Articles 40, 41, and 45 of the Draft Constitution, which “provide for legislation to discriminate against certain classes of citizens, and especially against women” (Brady 2021). “I do not see how anyone holding advanced views on the rights of women can support it, and that is a tragic dilemma for those who have been loyal and ardent workers in the national cause”, she wrote, articulating the sentiments of the Irish Women Writers’ Club whose energies were firmly focused on protesting the clauses at this period. Despite their lobbying (and minor success in securing the inclusion of “without distinction of sex” and the removal of the phrase “inadequate strength of women”), the patriarchal tone and content of the 1937 Constitution, as documented by Luddy (2005), was a source of profound disappointment to Macardle and her peers. Following on from the divisiveness of the Civil War, the encoding of gendered repression within the legislation further deflated Macardle’s belief in the possibilities of a progressive egalitarian republic, and her activist energies shift to more urgent humanitarian crises playing out in Europe with the outbreak of the Second World War. Her later fiction, however, plays host to the essence of some of these ideological complexities, and although The Uninvited is set at quite some distance from the explicit privations of revolutionary conflict, the novel brings the frustrated energies of the period into stark relief.

“Dreams are an abstraction of a repressed conflict, disguised in symbols” declares Rodney, the main character, early on in the novel, in one of numerous textual nods to the dialectic of hope and disappointment that is distilled into this curiously flat novel. While Macardle’s earlier short fiction Earthbound and Other Supernatural Stories introduces otherworldly themes to conjure a revivalist mysticism (Molidor 2008), the later novels revisit these gothic tropes to issue a more complex and subversive commentary on recent political and cultural events. The Uninvited and The Unforeseen, in particular, can be interpreted in the context of their production, as well as explicitly responding to the consequences of the gender politics of the period. The novel presents “half-Irish” brother and sister Rodney and Pamela Fitzgerald as they purchase a remote house on the south coast of England previously occupied by the Meredith family. Upon moving into the house, the idyllic quickly turns unbearable, as Cliff End reveals itself to be occupied by restless ghosts who weep, keen, and rage. The concept of hauntology, as proposed by Avery Gordon (2008), suggests that ghostly matters signify that which is missing. Gordon says, “Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way… we’re notified that what’s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us.” Furthermore, hauntology “alters the experience of time” and Macardle’s disrupted narrative temporalities in The Uninvited are caused by the disturbed debris of the past in the form of two spectral women unable to rest, trapped in an eternal haunting of their former home, the house at Cliff Edge.

The Uninvited offers a monstrous version of the sacrosanct domestic enshrined in the Irish Constitution. Ostensibly presented as a “natural primary and fundamental unit” as per the contested Article 41 of the Constitution, the Meredith family that previously occupied Cliff End is revealed to be totally transgressive: behind the façade of propriety lies a philandering husband, a “cold, self-conscious, egotistical” wife, an exotic mistress, and an illegitimate child. The concept of the home as the site of maternal duty, as per de Valera’s proclamation (in Beaumont 1999) that “everyone knows there is little chance of having a home in the real sense if there is no woman in it, the woman is really the homemaker”, is pursued to its extreme conclusion, whereby the two mothers in the novel, Mary and Carmel, are bound to Cliff End, unable to leave during their lives and haunting it after death. The destructive battle played out between two women battling for the maternity of a contested child speaks back to the intimate and corrosive conflicts of the Civil War, as well as to the inhospitable nature of society for women.

The psychic damage enacted through societal expectations, gendered performativity, and limited autonomy is articulated through the suffering of the two ghosts that trouble Cliff End. While ghostly female anger ostensibly dominates The Uninvited, a closer reading suggests that impotence is the prevailing emotion. Anger here is not a deliberate expression borne out of a context towards a target; rather, it is the psychic overspilling of a lifetime of frustrated energy with nowhere to turn. The psychological effects of the haunting of Cliff End on the inhabitants of the house manifest themselves as a kind of “paralysis”, a stultifying, deflating sense of disappointment. In her taxonomy of ugly feelings, Ngai refers to this as “affective disorientation”, which serves both to defamiliarize the mundane and to counter any impulse towards catharsis within the literary text. While the ghostly noises and shapes activate the high register of horror, it is the low hum of inaction and stasis in The Uninvited that speaks more profoundly to the aestheticization of disappointment. Pamela describes how “I tried to make myself get out of bed but I– couldn’t make myself move”; Judith perceives “stark old age” in the looking-glass; later the same night, Rodney experiences a devastating glimpse of his own futility while sleeping in the poisoned space of the studio. “I was empty: I dredged into my own mind and found nothing there. My youthful energy was already exhausted… I was finished: finished at thirty.” The anxiety, irritation, and paranoia experienced by the non-paranormal characters in the novel are often vague feelings, rendering the character blank and empty: “I tried to think but could not. I could see nothing—nothing about Stella or Carmel or Mary anymore. All logic was fallen into chaos. I only knew that the wind was moaning dismally and that rain was thrashing the greenhouse roof and that Stella was a hundred miles away.” In staging terror alongside tedium, Macardle realises an “affective disorientation” through the text, which is experienced by the characters as disempowerment. Just as the ghostly presences lament their unfulfilled lives, the Fitzgerald siblings find themselves, for the majority of the narrative, similarly voided of autonomy and subject to unknowable forces beyond their control.

Although the novel’s conclusion wrestles back control by exerting a thorough resolution, the happy ending is perfunctory to the point of being formulaic. The final twenty-five pages of the novel manage to banish the evil ghost of Mary, console the benevolent spirit of Carmel, kill off Stella’s hostile grandfather, engage Rodney and Stella to be married, set in train the relationship of Pamela and Mr Ingram, retain the services of servant Lizzie, and commit to a lifetime at Cliff End, thereby tying up all the narrative’s loose ends. This simplicity jars against the complexities of the narrative and adds, in a meta-textual manner, to the overarching sense of frustration and disappointment that inflects the novel. In a way, the facile resolution is the only possibility of overcoming the novel’s ideological complexities around gender, domesticity, and autonomy, which reflect Macardle’s own reservations about the emergent Free State. The oblique angle of Macardle’s fictional work in refracting her wider concerns about the legacies and implications of the revolution and its aftermath suggests the ways in which literature can distil less well-remembered moments into an essence, not unlike the perfumed scent that permeates Cliff End in the presence of its ghosts. The lingering impression of The Uninvited is a kind of deflation—a sophisticated, subversive representation of the affect of “suspended agency”, which defined the experience of Macardle and her peers in the early years of the Free State.

5. “Stories Like That Linger in a Lonely Place”: Linking Legacies of Loss

The shadow life of these three novels, defined by a long gestation, a difficult birth, or a stunted life, is intimated by the naming process of the books themselves. The Troubled House was originally titled A House Divided, My Cousin Justin becomes Turn Ever Northward, and The Uninvited began its existence as Uneasy Freehold. In the spectrality of these novels as they came into being and then faded away, we see a restaging of their authors’ experience as women in the public domain after independence. The stuttered evolution of the writers’ own trajectories of literary ambition and political ideals speaks to the voided position of women in the new Irish state: they can be situated within what Mitchell (2012) describes as “exemplary tradition of republican women who, after the founding of the Irish Free State, drifted off to the margins like ghosts, haunting the reactionary, ultra-conservative, patriarchal state that emerged following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921”. These three novels foreground the argument that women experienced the years of violence and political agitation, and the aftermath, in particular ways, and that literary texts authored by women aestheticize the specifically feminist experience of hope-into-disappointment as it rises and falls in line with the period of conflict. The textual interlinkages clearly delineated in these three novels suggest the possibility of expanding existing critical paradigms to situate the ideological, feminist, and political networks in which Rosamond Jacob, Margaret Barrington, and Dorothy Macardle operated. In the context of what Foster (2015) describes as “the national project of restabilization (and clericalization)”, within which these women writers undertake their literary subversions, these works offer a means of conceptualising the shared experience of hope and disappointment, so common to female activists and writers of the period. While their works have fallen out of the canonical narrative that seeks to account for the revolutionary period and its aftermath, theorising the “ugly feelings” that define these novels opens up new ways of analysing the origins of the subversive energies iterated and propagated in Irish women’s writing into the twentieth century.