Alice Curtayne: clearclassicsblog 4

ALICE  CURTAYNE (1898-1981): HISTORIAN, ESSAYIST AND NOVELIST.

When I was growing up in the 1960s most houses had a copy of Irish Saints For Boys and Girls.  In our house it was ‘read to bits’ until the cover fell off (though the good binding held). We coloured in all the pictures (by the great Eileen Coghlan) with crayon: we barely noticed who the author was.

The author was Alice Curtayne, who had been writing authoritatively about Irish and Italian saints, Italian poetry, Irish patriots and Irish history,  since the 1920s.

Born in Tralee in 1898, Curtayne attended the La Sainte Union convent school in Southampton, and then went to Italy to work as secretary for an English-speaking businessman. She devoted her evenings and weekends to learning Italian and studying Dante, later commenting that she ‘lived like a hermit’ at this time, although her novel (discussed below) suggests that she got out and about quite a bit, to La Scala and the lakes, and into the homes of a variety of Italian people.  Extensive research in Italian archives led to her first two books, St Catherine of Siena (1929) and A Recall To Dante (1932), which  published by Sheed & Ward in London. At this stage she was back living in Ireland, writing and lecturing.  Biographies of St Brigid and Patrick Sarsfield followed, and a book of essays, some pamphlets on religious themes and some translations of Italian works on saints’ lives; most of these were published in Dublin.  Her only novel was House of Cards, in 1939.This is a vividly descriptive account of the heroine, Anne Farrelly’s, experiences, first teaching for a brief period in England, and then working in an office in Italy. Although Anne’s competence and pride in her work are portrayed as worthwhile in themselves, the novel is ultimately a lament for the career-woman (or, as she was known at the time, the ‘business girl’) who chooses work in preference to marriage. In a public lecture in the Theatre Royal in Dublin in October 1933, Curtayne hoped fervently that the spectacle of thin-lipped,  skinny  young women all  rushing for offices from London’s Charing Cross station, would never become a reality in Dublin. (Female office workers were, in fact, multiplying as rapidly in Irish cities and towns as elsewhere.) But House of Cards is first and foremost a hymn of love to Italy: like the young Maura Kelly (later Laverty) in Spain around the same time, Curtayne relished every minute of her immersion in a culture so different to that of small-town Ireland. Laverty’s ‘novelisation’ of her time in Spain, No More Than Human, was published in 1944; maybe it was inspired by House of Cards.

Six of Curtayne’s books, including House of Cards,  have been brought out in bright new editions by the American-based Cluny Media. One of them is her book of essays, Borne on the Wind, first published in 1934 when she was in her mid-thirties.  Although female historians were by no means unknown in the Ireland of her time – Helena Concannon, Alice Stopford Green and many more – Curtayne’s easy, accessible style and popularity as a lecturer made  her something of a celebrity, whose books were reviewed very positively in the Irish and British media. What strikes the modern reader about Borne on the Wind is not only the elegant writing, but the authoritative voice, whether Curtayne is writing about early Irish manuscripts, Matt Talbot,  the building of Milan Cathedral in the fourteenth century, or Daniel O’Connell’s birthplace.   Her elegantly declamatory sentences are like those of Rebecca West.  Here is her description of  Dublin decked out for the Eucharistic Congress of 1932:

There was no citizen of Dublin too obscure or humble to be without a sense of personal responsibility for that High Altar [in the Phoenix Park]…And far from resenting that critical and anxious solicitude, the authorities were humbly hopeful that their efforts would come up to the expectations of the jarveys, the flower-sellers, and the apple-vendors – for that is the Irish way.

What an interesting contemporary perspective on Irish society of the early 1930s, one which would have today’s historians scratching their heads and wondering what they have missed. The opening paragraph of her book about Dante, also republished by Cluny (1933) exudes a similar, unfamiliar confidence:

Dante, to English-speaking Catholics, is a neglected inheritance. Even in our present phase of emancipation from false historical and literary traditions, he has received insufficient attention.

Curtayne was living through a global renaissance of Catholic thought and activism; her early publishers Sheed & Ward were part of this movement.  There is the same sense of pride in a specifically Catholic political tradition in the opening paragraphs of her biography of Catherine of Siena:

They [the free communes of which Siena was one] gave authority to rule and as freely took it away when they considered it abused. They fully obeyed only when they trusted. One has ceased even to dream of such liberty today. Here, too, women occasionally soared into a freedom that makes modern feminism look foolish. They did not do it by suffrage or by adopting boyish dress, but by cutting the thongs of their own futility. 

There are many valid counter-arguments one could make about this, and about similar opinions on modern feminism in Curtayne’s 1933 lecture, referred to above, and published as a pamphlet in 1934. In this lecture/pamphlet, she comments that women in Ireland were granted equal political rights with men in 1922 ‘without their having had to lift a finger to secure it’. Had the very active Irish suffrage movement of the first two decades of the century been so swallowed up by the revolution that a very intelligent, well-read and alert young woman remained unaware of it in the 1930s? As in the other extracts cited above, Curtayne’s writings give us the perspective of an educated female Catholic of her time, and form part of a wider argument that female saints and foundresses of active religious orders were forerunners of a kind of feminism long pre-dating the Reformation, not to mind the suffrage movement.

Curtayne wrote all her life, and on many topics other than religion. In 1960/1962 she published The Irish Story, a survey of Irish history, and a decade later, a biography of Francis Ledwidge. Throughout the 1940s and 50s,  she wrote several articles for learned journals, and book reviews for the Irish Press which are still a pleasure to read.  Reviewing Dorothy L.Sayers’ Introductory Papers on Dante (Methuen) in  the Irish Press (19/3/55), she notes good-humouredly that Sayers took issue with her, Curtayne’s, interpretations in her book of two decades previously: ‘I was delighted that I gave the occasion for Miss Sayers to let off steam in such an entertaining manner.’   Curtayne and Sayers had this much in common:  neither of them saw herself as a marginal or timid voice. Their confidence in their right to be heard gives their writing a joyful freshness that endures to this day.   Mo Moulton, in her study of Dorothy L.Sayers, comments that ‘They [female writers and scholars of the first half of the 20th century] were pushed out of the main lines of promotion and success, and instead of reproducing the world of their fathers and mothers, they made something new’.

I have embarked on an exciting exploration of the ‘something new’ that Alice Curtayne developed and was part of.

BOOKS mentioned above ( not a complete bibliography of Curtayne’s writing, by any means.)

Alice Curtayne, St Catherine of Siena (London: Sheed & Ward 1929: Illinois: Tan 1980).

____________ A Recall To Dante (London: Sheed & Ward 1932).

____________ St Brigid of Ireland (Dublin:  Talbot Press 1933)

_____________Patrick Sarsfield: the story of the soldier (Dublin: Talbot Press 1934)

_____________Borne on the Wind (Dublin: Browne & Nolan 1934).

_____________The New Woman (Dublin: Anthonian Press 1934).

_____________House of Cards (Dublin: Talbot Press 1939).

______________Irish Saints For Boys and Girls (Dublin: Talbot Press 1955)

______________More Tales of Irish Saints (Dublin: Talbot Press 1958).

____________   The Irish Story (N.Y: P.J.Kenedy & Sons 1960:  Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds 1962)

____________Francis Ledwidge: a life of the poet (Martin, Bryan & O’Keeffe 1972: Dublin: New Island Books 1998).

Mo Moulton, Mutual Admiration Society: how Dorothy L.Sayers and her Oxford circle remade the world for women (London: Corsair 2019), p.6.

Maura Laverty, No More Than Human (London: Longmans Green 1944).

All Curtayne’s books except for St Catherine of Siena, the 1950s books about the saints and the biography of Ledwidge, have been reissued by Cluny Media, Providence,  Rhode Island, since 2020.  The Irish Story American edition (republished by Cluny 2020) is somewhat different to the Irish one.

A FEW WORDS ABOUT CLEAR CLASSICS:

I’m Caitriona Clear and I’ve been addicted to reading from an early age. This blog is about books I keep coming back to, books and authors I want to share with others, mostly from the mid-20th century, but I’ll be referring to more recent books I’ve enjoyed, from time to time.