Rosamond Jacob and the Hidden Histories of Irish Writing

Abstract

Rosamond Jacob and the Hidden Histories of Irish Writing Gerardine Meaney The case of Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House raises fundamental questions about the process by which novels become, or fail to become, part of national and academic canons. The extraordinary diaries of the novel’s author also offer an unusually detailed insight into the alchemical processes that transform historical events, personal stories, political activism, social milieu, friendship, love, and desire into fiction. Read today, it is hard to understand how such a well-written novel—one that concerns a defining moment in Irish history, the Anglo-Irish War; that maps tragic structure onto historical circumstance; and that challenges so many preconceptions—has remained obscure and out of print for so long. Reading the diaries, we can see that Jacob’s particular view of the conflict in which she participated generated ambivalent reactions from the dominant cultural institutions that emerged in the new Irish state. As late as May 10, 1936, an editor at Duffy’s publishing house told Jacob that “A House Divided” (the earlier title for A Troubled House) was too sad, and he would not publish it at that time—but might later when he felt he could risk more.1 Later in the same year, however, extracts from the novel were published in the Irish Press, the official organ of the Fianna Fáil party. The relative obscurity of the novel even in scholarly circles has been extended by the fact that, oddly, it was not reprinted in the 1970s and 1980s by any of the feminist publishing houses, such as Arlen House in Dublin, or Virago and Pandora in London. Such presses helped to restore Kate O’Brien to the center of accounts of the twentieth-century Irish novel, and assisted the slow reappraisal of such earlier writers as Katherine Cecil Thurston and Frances Sheridan. Jacob’s obscurity may have been perpetuated by her combination of apparently antithetical ideological commitments to feminism and republicanism, which both connected her to the center of Irish politics and alienated her from it. Her literary style, neither high modernism nor depressed realism, likewise made her hard to classify for literary historians. These oppositions are, of course, a retrospective construction. The Troubled House, seen in the milieu of the dissident political, social, and artistic circles that it represents and which produced it, challenges the simplistic view that the energies that produced massive upheavals in early twentieth-century Ireland simply died of exhaustion in the aftermath of [End Page 70] the civil war. More important, the novel challenges the persistent myth that Irish feminism vanished with the suffrage movement, only to be reinvented ex nihilo in the 1970s. Casting a backward glance at this Irish novel is particularly timely now, when such feminist critics as Freeman, Rohy, and Traub are proposing new modes of understanding literary history and temporality across a broad range of historical periods.2 Jacob’s quest to find a publisher for The Troubled House was a long one; that of finishing it, even longer. Jacob’s friendships with other political and literary women both helped and hindered her progress. On May 31 1924, she went to visit her old friend and former cellmate, Dorothy Macardle. As she notes in her diary, Macardle’s feedback was at turns fierce and perceptive: Afterwards when they were gone I read the Cullen story aloud to her and she abused Mrs C as utterly unlike a real mother—unmaternal—aggressive, tactless, hard, weak—always “butting in.” I felt I must be making a great exposé of myself, but also felt she had a rather conventional sentimental idea of a proper mother. But she was right about one scene with Roddy.3 The “Cullen story” was to go on to have a further working title of “A House Divided” before it was eventually published in 1938 as The Troubled House. The mixture of literary activity and political activism, friendship and disagreement on that evening in 1924 was typical of Jacob and Macardle’s relationship. Both were middle class women whose cultural activism and political interests were transformed by the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War. Both were already established writers...