An Irishwoman of letters between Newman and Wagner: Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald (1846–1939), her literary, religious and political career

Abstract

299 An Irishwoman of letters between Newman and Wagner: Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald (1846–1939), her literary, religious and political career Patrick Maume* [Accepted 19 April 2018. Published 14 June 2018] This paper analyses the life and writings of a significant late Victorian Irish woman writer who has attracted little attention. Loeber and Loeber’s guide to Irish fiction lists Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald as the author of four novels whose content suggests she may have been Irish. In fact, Penrose Fitzgerald was a member of a Cork landed family heavily involved in the Land War; as a convert to Catholicism who corresponded with John Henry Newman, and as a Wagner aficionado who wrote several books on eighteenth-century Ireland and on Mitteleuropean subjects under the pen-name ‘Frances Gerard’. This paper draws on her surviving published and unpublished correspondence; on scattered newspaper references, and on an analysis of her six novels to discuss her responses to the Land War and to late nineteenthcentury feminism. It suggests that her later move from extreme pro-landlord conservatism to republicanism may have been influenced by her (conservative) suffragism. Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald, who was born in Cork city in 1846, belonged to a County Cork gentry family prominent on the landlord side in the conflicts of the 1880s. Her position as a ‘surplus’unmarried daughter in a family largely tolerant of her interests both enabled and constrained her, in a manner characteristic of many Victorian upper-class families. Penrose Fitzgerald was a Catholic convert and admirer of John Henry Newman, with whom she corresponded; these exchanges provide valuable though sporadic opportunities to glimpse the private attitudes and concerns (often muted in print) which shape her published writings. She published five novels as ‘Naseby’ between 1870 and 1890, and another novel and eight books on eighteenth-century Irish high society and Germanic topics (she was a Wagnerian ) as ‘Frances A. Gerard’between 1889 and 1903.1 The ‘Naseby’novels manifest * Author’s e-mail: pmaume@googlemail.com doi: https://doi.org/10.3318/PRIAC.2018.118.02 1 The origins of Penrose Fitzgerald’s pseudonyms are unclear; possibly there was a family connectiontothe1645Battleof NasebyduringtheEnglishCivilWar,and‘FrancesA.Gerard’ may derive from a partial rearrangement of her name with the ‘A’ representing her mother’s maiden name Austen, but in our current state of knowledge these are purely speculative. Introduction Abstract Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy Vol. 118C, 299–326 © 2018 Royal Irish Academy Patrick Maume 300 a trajectory from depiction of the regeneration of the landed class through moral and religious reawakening (implicitly though not explicitly Catholic) to anger and near-despair over the violence of the land agitation; the ‘Frances A. Gerard’books, which were more commercially oriented, may suggest escape from a diminished present into eighteenth-century aesthetics and German romanticism, but they interrogate their subjects as well as celebrate them. Penrose Fitzgerald was a suffragist (albeit of conservative views) which possibly influenced her later conversion to Irish nationalism, yet in the 1920s she moved to England, where she died in 1939. Penrose Fitzgerald is largely forgotten except by a few historians of Irish literature and Newman scholars; both groups are largely unaware of her full career . Ralph and Magda Loeber’s standard bibliography of Irish fiction 1650–1900 lists four novels by her, but provides no biographical details beyond: ‘floruit 1870. Given the Irish settings of Geraldine Penrose Fitzgerald’s stories, she was probably Irish or of Irish extraction’.2 Newman’s letters to Penrose Fitzgerald (and extracts from her few surviving letters to him) are in his published correspondence, and two studies of Newman mention her: Meriol Trevor presents her as a charming young woman whose treatment of Newman as substitute grandfather testifies to his continuing ability to befriend the young,3 and Joyce Sugg emphasises her self-­ dramatisation and the worries she caused Newman.4 This paper combines literary analysis of her publications and dealings with Newman, with information located in contemporary newspapers. It draws on the few surviving letters from Penrose Fitzgerald to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory, and provides the first—albeit fragmentary—overview of a life touching on many religious, agrarian and political tensions of Ireland under the...