Elaine Crowley, Technical Virgins

Abstract

Elaine Crowley was born in the Liberties area of Dublin in 1927 to a Brighton-born father and an Irish mother. Her father’s death from tuberculosis in 1942 exacerbated the family’s economic plight and brought closer the prospect of emigration. She eventually left Ireland at the end of the Second World War and joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) — a branch of the British army staffed entirely by women — which took her to a base near Chester in Cheshire, where she met the Welshman she would later marry. After periods spent in Germany and Egypt, the couple settled in Port Talbot in Wales to raise a family of six. It wasn’t until Crowley was in her fifties that she acted upon a long-held literary interest by joining a writers’ group in Swansea. This proved to be the stimulus she needed to produce her first novel, Dreams of Other Days (1984), a family saga set in Famine Ireland. Its commercial success led to a further seven romantic novels published over 20 years, together with two volumes of autobiography, Cowslips and Chainies (1996), which recreates her Dublin childhood, and Technical Virgins, Crowley’s account of her ATS years in the late 1940s. In chronicling her transformation from naive Catholic teenager into streetwise young woman, Crowley offers a version of emigration from de Valera’s Ireland which, by accentuating the triumph of agency and adaptation over anguish and nostalgia, contrasts markedly with that of many male autobiographers of the same period. Far from being a living hell, England was for Crowley a place of joyful liberation, a ‘land of Tir na nOg’, as she memorably phrases it in the following excerpt.