Nobody can predict what novels will survive and what ones will disappear. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1939) was seen as a run-of- the- mill mystery novel when it first appeared, but it has never been out of print, which is more than can be said of many Literary Novels from the period by Hugh Walpole, Beverly Nichol and other writers (male and female) acclaimed by contemporaries. Talking of Ireland, if some female novelists popular in their day have now been forgotten, the same is true of many male novelists, among them Donn Byrne, Lynn Doyle, Kevin Fitzgerald, Timothy Wharton, Patrick Purcell, Philip Rooney and John D.Sheridan; Francis MacManus’s novels were reprinted in the 1970s, but in conversation a few years ago I heard a very well-read (to put it mildly) eminent Irish historian in his late 70s confuse him with the very different writer, Seumas MacManus.
Each of the novelists I’m writing about today could pen a good, racy, pacy novel where the reader cares about the characters, and they obviously sold their books because each wrote more than one, and publishers are not charitable organizations. Their books, however, were very much of their time, but because of this rootedness in time and place, they give sometimes predictable and sometimes surprising insights into what women writers could imagine and publish in this era in Ireland.
Both authors were convent-educated; Brennan, of Wexford parents, grew up in Dublin and went to Sion Hill convent and Joyce-Prendergast (Prendergast was her married name) grew up in Tipperary and was educated by the Dominicans and the Ursulines, and started writing when she was living in New Jersey with her husband. Brennan also wrote children’s books and edited the Fry-Cadbury magazine for children. All biographical information about both authors is taken from Eason’s Bulletin. I wouldn’t know about them otherwise. Neither merits an entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, though they might feature in some of the older literary dictionaries compiled in the 1960s and ’70s. Their books were reviewed in the Irish Press and Irish Independent.
Starting with the more successful of the two (who kept publishing up to the 1980s but never features in round-ups of Irish female authors) Elizabeth Brennan was described by Eason’s Bulletin in 1949 as ‘in the front rank of Irish novelists.’ Her first novel, Out of the Darkness (1944)a psycho-supernatural mystery set in a fishing village of uncertain location (the locals speak a kind of generic English-rural dialect but ‘cross’ themselves when startled or afraid, as they frequently are)sold over 7,000 copies and was translated into Danish. The narrator is a female novelist, who has come to the village to finish her book. She goes up to ‘town’ from time to time but whether this is London or Dublin is never specified. The villagers are ‘superstitious’ and are talked down to unabashedly by the retired schoolmaster and other educated people like the narrator. A good mystery story, it conforms to the conventions of its time in its attitude to ‘non-educated’ people, physical and mental disability, and mental illness. Brennan’s second novel, Am I My Brother’s Keeper (1946)is very different, set in modern Ireland and in London. Stella, a journalist, has been sacked from her job on an Irish provincial newspaper for writing an article criticising the government, but she should have no trouble picking up a new job, one of her male friends, a doctor,tells her: ‘At no time has your sex been so unshackled by social fetters as it is today.’ They all emigrate – ‘Farewell Grainne Wale and thanks for nothing!’ one of the doctors says as the ship pulls away. Emigration of medics was quite high in the 1940s, when Irish medical schools were turning out too many graduates for the limited number of medical posts available. Eventually, one of the doctors returns to Ireland when the Department of Health is set up, in a desire to do good for his country. Drug addiction and alcoholism are minor themes in this rather surprising novel, and Stella, at the end (spoiler) doesn’t find True Love but becomes a famous newspaper editor in Ireland. Brennan’s third novel, Whispering Walls (1948) is a return to the familiar territory of the coastal mystery, and has all the tropes of a certain type of gothic writing – a mysterious and malevolent servant, a castle, wary and frightened locals, but into this are thrown the very modern figures of Una, an analytical chemist with the Public Analysts Office in Dublin, and Kitty, a junior librarian who gets a job as a research assistant for a history book being written by the owner of the castle. Unlike the other mystery, the novel is self-consciously Irish; set in Dalkey and Dublin, there are a lot of Irish phrases and references to Irish history in it.
While Brennan’s novels were usually favourably reviewed in the Irish Press and the Irish Independent, ‘gushy’ and ‘naive’ were often used in reviews of Joyce-Prendergast’s. Her first novel, This – My Land (1944), is a vividly-written story about a widowed mother of 8 children, and their various destinies – some emigrate, some stay at home, and one, Mary, realises her ambition to go to university. There is a son a seminarian, emigration is deplored as a longing for the ‘bright lights’ rather than seen as an economic necessity, and there is an idealization of Irish rural life which she continued in her subsequent novels. A farmer’s bride, ‘a radiant figure in powder-blue’ is described as ‘over-made-up for a farmer’s wife…a brilliant lipstick to lips that ordinarily had no need of it.’ This disdain for cosmetics and modern fashions when worn by rural or lower-middle/working-class characters was common among female writers of all political tendencies and religions in both Ireland and Britain in the 1930s and ’40s. In her second novel Vintage (1945),Penny wants desperately to become a surgeon, but her obligations to her widowed sister, Denise, hold her back and she does not realize her ambition until Denise gets a new man. (Penny does not need a man – the job is her dream.) Denise needs a lot of emotional support because she is depressed, not because her husband is dead – he was a cold and manipulative bully -but because she is still suffering from having had to submit to ‘the demands of marriage’ with him. She confides this to a priest. Religion is very important in Joyce-Prendergast’s books. This one is dedicated to ‘Mary, Queen of Ireland’ and her third novel, Windyhill (1946) is dedicated to the Holy Ghost. It has the same idealization of rural life ‘simple, good-humoured people who lived on frugal but solid food, and who prayed in the peaceful little chapel, or in their homes, and died without any fuss or bother.’ (odd little comment at the end there, but the echoes of Eamon de Valera’s 1943 St Patrick’s Day speech are strong.) But it’s a pleasant story with strong characters that clips along at a good pace, and there is an insistence (albeit hedged around with mellifluous religious language) on the non-shamefulness of marital sex.
Both writers, while they show the conventional respect for romance and pair-bonding, show-case independent working women and consider female independence a good thing in itself. Except for Brennan’s first book, both writers describe and evoke the Ireland of their time as they see it – Joyce-Prendergast refers to the low marriage rate in Windyhill , and Brennan tackles emigration, unemployment and silencing of dissent. A surgeon and newspaper editor might seem outlandishly unrealistic fates for Irish women of that time, but these authors’ imagination and optimism is significant in itself.
None of these 1940s novels though, could be fully enjoyed today by anybody other than a historian. Brennan’s two mystery novels are too much of their time, and her topical one, while it is very original, crams too many ‘issues’ into one story. Joyce-Prendergast’s religiosity and enthusing about ‘innocent, happy’ country people are embarrassing. Reading them got me thinking about modern novels and which of them will survive and which won’t. Writers of formulaic (though enjoyable) mystery novels with whatever the latest trend is at the core of the mystery should take note; your books will date, and date quickly.(At present the trend is coercive control by males. Last year I read two mystery novels (all out around the same time) in which someone living in one’s big house unknownst to one was the theme, obviously a cautionary tale about property. A few years ago people-trafficking was the big reveal, but that has disappeared almost completely, maybe because of a fall-off in sympathy for illegal immigrants on these islands. Before that again, it was child sexual abuse.) Secondly, there is nothing that dates a book quicker than too-strong an adherence to the values of its time. Joyce-Prendergast’s religious references and sanctification of the rural would have been hugely popular in the monolithic Catholic culture of the 1940s. The books of modern Irish authors (they know who they are) which break off the narrative to inform the reader solemnly about Ireland’s successful gay marriage or Repeal the Eighth campaigns in little informative paragraphs (i.e when it doesn’t come up naturally in the story – and sometimes even when it does) will be of great interest to the historian in thirty or forty years, but won’t be classics for the ages.
Kathleen Joyce-Prendergast, This – My Land (Dublin: Gill 1944)
Elizabeth Brennan, Out of the Darkness (Dublin: Metropolitan 1945).
Kathleen Joyce-Prendergast, Windyhill (Cork: Mercier 1946)
Elizabeth Brennan, Am I My Brother’s Keeper? (Dublin: Metropolitan 1946).
Kathleen Joyce-Prendergast, Vintage (Dublin: Gill 1946).
Elizabeth Brennan, Whispering Walls (Dublin: Metropolitan 1948)
Tony Farmar, The History of Irish Book Publishing (Gloucester: the History Press 2018).
Eason’s Bulletin 1945-52.
RECENT READS.
I’ve read a lot of new books over the past while, but I only want to write about ones I unreservedly like, or respect, and because I referred, in today’s blog, to ‘issue novels’ that are clunky or don’t work, I wanted to write about one that does work.
Claire Gleeson, Show Me Where It Hurts (London: Sceptre 2025).
This novel, which got mixed reviews when it appeared earlier this year, doesn’t seem to have been promoted or pushed and it remains to be seen if it will appear in annual roundups of ‘reads of the year’ – it is one of mine anyway if anybody ever asks me. (Nobody ever does.) The theme is the all-too-topical one of family annihilation, when a parent decides to kill everyone else in the family including him or herself (because women do this too.) Rachel’s husband Tom, driving back to Dublin from her parents’ house in Wicklow, deliberately drives the car off the road but succeeds in killing only the two small children, a boy and a girl (who are never named. I couldn’t understand why.) The story is about what happened before – how they met, how Rachel fell in love not only with him, he seemed really sound, but with his really gentle and kind parents, and how, during their marriage she became aware of his deep depression. But he was never violent. The bravery of the story is its exploration of what happens after – he is found not guilty by reason of insanity and serves a 7-year sentence and then is released to live with his parents. Their lives are completely broken too but they have to take him in – where else can he go? The story develops along parallel timelines, and it works (often it doesn’t).
The book reminded me of Emily Ruskovich’s Idaho (2017), which is also about what happens after the terrible event. The main character of Idaho murders her little girl with an axe in a fit of rage at her unfaithful husband. It is absolutely shocking and horrible but that isn’t the end. She has to live with what she has done and she serves her long sentence and eventually she is released. Gleeson’s book is non-sensational in the same way and some critics, I remember, found it a bit too gentle, and too subtle. It avoids drama, because these events are often not dramatic in themselves, they happen easily and naturally on ordinary days during or after everyday events – a Sunday drive, after school,a trip to see grandparents. The court cases and secure mental hospital and visiting days – Rachel actually visits Tom – and her going back to work and carrying on, are all described. Rachel meets another woman in a similar situation and finds no comfort or healing in that. She divorces Tom and eventually meets another man, Peter. She keeps wondering if she could have known, could have prevented it at all, but she understands in the end that she could not have. That is the only ‘closure’ she ever attains; the burden is lifelong. There is no demonisation of Tom, and no hatred of him, just an appalling, bottomless pity for his lifelong agony and of course, her own. This is a brave, sensitive book, a bit too subtle for some reviewers I’d say, who want revenge and drama and confrontation and eventually, the heroine sloughing off the sadness for her new life. Tragedy is a life sentence and few writers are brave enough to admit it.
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