I’m not going to start this blog with a high-pitched academic whine about how neglected this author is by Irish literary scholars and cultural historians. She is neglected, but I’m not sure anybody can be blamed for not noticing her. It is all too easy to miss people we are not actively looking for in the past – I wouldn’t have known about Smithson if I hadn’t borrowed her books from the library as a teenager, and found one or two in my grandfather’s house. Smithson doesn’t fit into any of the categories historians or literary scholars normally find interesting. Her books weren’t banned, in fact, their values were those of the newly-independent Irish state. She was not part of any literary or social circle – she didn’t belong to the Irish Women Writers’ Club, founded in 1933, which included quite a diverse bunch of writers, and her books didn’t achieve the kind of contemporary or retrospective critical respect accorded to the likes of Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavin, Norah Hoult, Elizabeth Bowen or even Maura Laverty. Yet Smithson sold more books in her day than all of these authors put together. All her 19 novels were best-sellers for their publisher, Talbot Press, and went into several editions. (Oddly, although she lived comfortably, she does not seem to have made a lot of money from her books.)
Socially she was out on a limb. She was born and reared in a Dublin Protestant family fallen on hard times, and spent her childhood and early adulthood helping her mother (widowed three times) with child after child until an aunt helped her to go to London to train as a nurse. She completed her training in Edinburgh, and came back to Ireland to work as a Jubilee nurse, one of those tough, dedicated apostles of public health who went out on bicycles in all weathers in rural districts to minister to women in childbirth, sick children and the elderly, to dress wounds and give advice and boss and scold people who remembered them ever afterwards with affection and reverence.
Was it her profession that set her apart a little from her literary contemporaries? Smithson was not only a nurse, she was also general secretary of the nurses’ trade union up to 1942. So maybe she was too busy for clubs. Maybe she lacked confidence – she was used to being patronised by newspaper reviewers and in her memoir she deplores her lack of formal education which might have resulted in ungrammatical English. Her books are not ungrammatical at all and the writing is fluent and vivid. Her characters are fallible and human; they fall in love, but the happy ending doesn’t always involve pairing off. This might reflect Smithson’s own life; she never married, though she had at least one very intense relationship, which had no future. (The man, a doctor with whom she worked closely, was married.)
Smithson converted to Catholicism in her late 30s (after which several relatives never spoke to her again) and was a member of Cumann na mBan during the Easter Rising. Relatives were a bit more positive about her conversion to nationalism, one of them telling her that her father had been ‘out’ in 1867 with the Fenians. A common plot point in her books is the heroine’s conversion to either Catholicism or revolutionary nationalism or both. Religious/political commitment usually entails painful decisions and sacrifices for the heroine. Smithson is such a persuasive writer that in one book, (I won’t say which, because that would be a spoiler) where the heroine seems to waver in choosing between her faith and the honest love of a very good divorced man (divorced through no fault of his own), the reader is hugely relieved when she chooses the faith. And a demanding faith it is too – Smithson has no time for the lukewarm. The lukewarm in love are also deplored, and ardent lovers who cool off are shown the door. And when politics, in the form of revolution, is part of the story – as it usually is, especially in the early books – there is no space for the less than fully committed.
Several of her early novels describe the work of district nursing, and are therefore very valuable as social history. Her Irish Heritage (1917) her first novel, goes into detail on the nurses’ hostel in Dublin. The Walk of a Queen, published in 1922, has a sympathetic bohemian suffragette; Smithson has a soft spot for the socially marginal and unconventional. She also has a great love for Dublin and most of her happy endings involve a glad return to the fair city. She hasn’t a great gift for describing either urban or rural landscapes, although she can describe living spaces and clothes and food quite vividly. Her main gift is for characterisation and plot. Smithson’s novels are page-turners and the action is fast and furious. One of my second-hand copies of her books had a page missing in the middle and sure enough, there was a real gap in the narrative as a result.
She has her faults. Like most of her female contemporary writers, she routinely caricatures typists and ‘shopgirls’, she indulges in wise, comical old family retainers who speak in dialect, she is unnecessarily nasty about English working-class people, and (like many of her contemporaries including Monica Dickens) she stereotypes Jews as money-lenders and unscrupulous businessmen. But every so often her insider knowledge of the revolutionary period shines through in unusual ways. In By Strange Paths (1942) a local Irish man joins the Black and Tans. There was, and still is, a myth that the ‘Tans and Auxiliaries were all Englishmen, and most were, but they were joined in every town and city by a some Irishmen. William Joyce (later ‘Lord Haw-Haw), from a middle-class Catholic background, joined the Auxiliaries in his native Galway. Other locals in Galway (and no doubt elsewhere, too) joined these forces. (Even after a century, their names although known to local historians, are never mentioned.)
Some of Smithson’s books were republished by Mercier Press in the 1980s and most recently, Carmen Cavanagh has been republished by Arlen House – the first, it is hoped, of many Smithson reprints. Second-hand copies of the Mercier paperbacks and of her Talbot Press hardbacks can be found in charity shops, second-hand bookshops (not the rare books places) – I’ve come across them in Chapters in Dublin, in the antique shop under the railway bridge on Talbot St in Dublin, Bargain Books in the Butterslip in Kilkenny, a second-hand bookshop on Little Catherine St in Limerick whose name escapes me, Charlie Byrne’s in Galway and in the charity bookshops on Botanic Avenue in Belfast.
I’ll be returning to Smithson again.
Annie M.P. Smithson, Her Irish Heritage (Dublin: Talbot Press 1917)
_______________The Walk of a Queen (Dublin: Talbot Press 1922)
_______________Carmen Cavanagh (Dublin: Talbot Press 1921: Arlen House 2022). The 2022 edition contains a brief biography of the author by Alan Hayes.
_______________By Strange Paths (Dublin: Talbot Press 1942).
_______________Myself – and Others (Dublin: Talbot Press 1944). Autobiography.
ABOUT CLEAR CLASSICS
Every week I write about authors and books I find interesting, most of them published before 1960.
Clear Classic Books 
Leave a comment