Priestly Fictions: Popular Irish Novelists of the Early 20th Century: Patrick A. Sheehan, Joseph Guinan, Gerald O'Donovan by Catherine Candy

Abstract

Priestly Fictions:Popular Irish Novelists of the Early 20th Century:Patrick A. Sheehan, Joseph Guinan, Gerald O'Donovan. By Catherine Candy. (Dublin:Wolfhound Press. 1996. Pp. 216. IR 112.99 paperback.) This is a study long overdue and very much to be welcomed.The Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century seems so abundant in writers of commanding reputation (e.g., W B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, Sean O'Casey, even-though he held himself aloof-James Joyce) that it is easy to forget that neither they nor the revival movement itself was very popular in their time. Contemporary readers more often preferred the novels of Canon Patrick Augustine Sheehan, positive in outlook though also thoughtful, or Canon Joseph Guinan's more resolutely sunny The Soggarth Aroon.This was Catholic, indeed clerical, literature, meant forthrightly to appeal to the conventions not only of political nationalism but also of religious morality then widespread in Ireland, in which respect certainly it contrasts with the modernist literature of the Revival. But clerical literature, even more than other forms of popular literature, suffers the neglect of literary scholars.These tend to cast its value as mainly historical, however well disposed they might otherwise be to invoking social history. At the same time, despite the steady blurring of distinctions among academic disciplines, it is still unusual for an historian to treat works of fiction more than incidentally. All the more reason, then, to respect Catherine Candy's discussion of popular clerical fiction in the final decades of the British imperium in Ireland at large. Sheehan (1852-1931), Guinan (1863-1932), and the less popular, anticlerical (and indeed, by the time he began publishing novels, former priest) Gerald O'Donovan (1871-1942) are of decided, if mainly historical, significance. Nearly contemporary with each other (although O'Donovan's first novel appeared the year that Sheehan died), they nonetheless offer quite distinct perspectives on the lives of ordinary Catholics, and especially on those of priests, in their time. Sheehan's sacerdotal characters reflect the mid-nineteenth century in Ireland, much aware though they are (as was Sheehan) that an exposition of Catholic faith more comfortable with complexity would become necessary. The old certainties of thought and behavior pulled strongly all the same, presenting in Sheehan a steadfast integrity that, combined with considerable narrative talent, drew an audience well beyond Ireland. He was much published in America, where his autocratic priests struck a nostalgic chord among many Catholic readers but also attracted Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Boston brahmin if ever there was one. …