Rosamond Jacob: An “Ordinary” Woman in the Early Free State

Abstract

Rosamond Jacob: An “Ordinary” Woman in the Early Free State Leeann Lane That Rosamond Jacob (1888–1960) is the first female author to feature in “A Backward Glance” would be a source of great satisfaction to her. Jacob spent much of her life, particularly in her later years, haunted by feelings of inadequacy and lack of fulfilment.1 Unmarried, she longed for—in the words of her character Constance Moore in the unpublished novel she titled “Third Person Singular”—a “happy love affair.” Well read, home-schooled, and intellectually curious, Jacob was born a generation too early to imagine or train for a career. She came of age between the cohort who adhered to the Victorian ideology of separate spheres and a later generation of single women who benefitted from first wave feminism. While she wrote steadily, Jacob’s diary entries are replete with mentions of publishers declining to publish her fiction. She failed to get The Troubled House published until 1938, more than a decade-and-a-half after she had begun to write it and nearly two decades after the publication of her first novel, Callaghan (1920).2 Yet, she clung to the notion of herself as a writer, needing to establish an autonomous identity in an Irish society structured, legally and socially, on an essentialist view of the domestic, married, childbearing, and childrearing woman. From the late 1920s on, Jacob lived increasingly on the fringes of Irish society; according to the evidence in her diary, the dominant expectation of Irish women to be wife and mother worked to infantilize and elide the single adult woman. Jacob’s later life was marked by alienation from the state and publishing marketplace, yet her writing of The Troubled House was marked by optimism. Jacob wrote the novel at a seminal moment in the history of the new postcolonial Irish state. She began drafting the novel in 1923: this date is important. While the disillusionment of the Treaty was real for those who saw it as a betrayal of the ideals of 1916, many anti-Treaty supporters held out hope, in the spring of 1923, for a political reversal. For Jacob, the civil war era represented a period of political excitement and intrigue, as had the earlier periods of the revolutionary struggle.3 Moreover, few female activists in 1923 foresaw the repressive [End Page 64] gendered legislation to come with the new Irish Free State. Jacob hoped that the new state afforded plenty of room for women artists like the fictional Nix, who embraced the alienation that was a prerequisite of the woman artist.4 However she personally identified more with the outlook of the novel’s protagonist, Maggie Cullen. Several methodological choices emerged in my biographical study of Jacob. The literary merit of the novel has been noted by Steele and Meaney, but The Troubled House is equally significant for how it investigates the political and cultural schisms of the revolutionary years from the perspective of a foot soldier, rather than a leader. Jacob’s lack of putative exceptionality for biographical study thus intersects with the historical importance of the novel. The standard biographical subject is the outstanding writer, the political leader, or the pioneer in social movements: Jacob’s “ordinariness” requires an alternative lens. Much as the last two volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (2001) “set out to challenge existing canons of Irish writing” by emphasizing breadth and range, rather than strict literary excellence, my interest in The Troubled House centers on how it offers a broader perspective on the Irish revolutionary and suffrage period. When I set out to write the first book-length biography of Jacob, I inevitably needed to explain to readers the merit in studying a female activist and writer on the fringes of feminist activism and nationalist politics. Jacob never assumed a leadership role in any of the political campaigns with which she was associated, but her experiences teach us a great deal about these significant years. In fact, the history of the revolutionary period—and of the campaign for female equality—is as much the history of followers as of leaders. More work needs to be done on how...