Emily Lawless, Natural History, and the Possibilities of Enchantment

Abstract

Natural History – including entomology, marine zoology, and botany – enjoyed a significant vogue in the late nineteenth century, coinciding with the much more widely celebrated and discussed literary and cultural revival. These, I argue, are not distinct but rather entwined movements. Placing the Irish novelist, poet and scientist Emily Lawless (1845–1913) within this context, and examining both her scientific research and novels including Major Lawrence F.L.S (1885) and The Book of Gilly (1906), this article explores the overlapping modes of science and literature in the work, and suggests that Lawless’s sustained and committed engagement in naturalist study in Ireland led to an attempt to harness the discourses of natural science into narratives of spiritual and national resurgence. Whereas many contemporaries – Yeats among them – rejected science as a disenchanting force, Lawless provides an illuminating counter-example, whose scepticism regarding the occult spiritualities of her Revival contemporaries led her to develop an alternative form of positivist spirituality which foregrounded the materiality of the natural world and the spiritual potential of close, detailed scientific study.