The term ‘forbidden love’ usually refers to a physical attraction whose consummation is taboo (incest or paedophilia), illegal (homosexuality up to comparatively recently nearly everywhere, and in many jurisdictions still) or socially transgressive ( adulterous, extra-marital sex). But in two novels which came out within a few years of each other in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, the doomed love affair is between two people who are free to marry, but of different social classes.
I know nothing at all about Margaret O’Leary, and the internet is of no help with her life story. Nor does she feature in the dictionaries of Irish and literary biography I cited some posts back, in the article on Alice Curtayne. I discovered O’Leary in the book review pages of the Irish Press and the Irish Independent in the 1930s; her first novel, The House I Made was published in 1935 and well-reviewed, and it dealt with themes of land and marriage. I read it in the National Library and did not enjoy it as much as her second, Lightning Flash, which came out four years later. I found a copy of the latter in that excellent, too-modestly-titled shop Bargain Books, in the Butterslip, Kilkenny city. This novel was based on a play of hers called The Woman, which was staged at the Abbey in 1930, to great acclaim – I found this much out from the internet, in fairness. (The novel has an introduction in the shape of a letter written in 1929 by W.B.Yeats praising the play.) The ‘woman’ in the novel (and the play) is Ellen Dunn, who lives on the mountain near Inchigeela, Co.Cork; she is delicate and beautiful, but a social outcast because her family are half-gypsy, and ‘odd’ into the bargain. (We aren’t told whether the word ‘gypsy’ means actual Roma people, or if it is being used, as it is in some parts of the country, to refer to Irish Travellers). The Dunns’ mountain dwelling is small and squalid and Ellen’s mother and brother are malicious and cringing by turns, although Ellen brings butter and eggs to the market to sell, just like every other woman, so they are not completely isolated. However it is when she is sitting by the lake where her grandmother (the ‘gypsy’) drowned that Ellen attracts the attention of young widower Maurice O’Hara, out on a walk. The O’Haras are decent people, personable and responsible, big farmers who were delighted to get the dowry that Maurice’s much older first wife brought to their house, and not particularly heartbroken when she died in childbirth with her second child, a girl, having already supplied the requisite boy. Maurice is keeping company with the pleasant, hard-working and genuinely good Kitty Boyle, home from an office job in Dublin, when he falls hopelessly in love with Ellen. Ellen is a bit ‘manic-pixie-dream-girl’, both feral (‘low murmurs’ and ‘sounds of delight’) and ethereal – dancing by herself out in nature. John’s father, hoping the infatuation will pass, gives him a mild lecture on good breeding in humans as well as animals, but his mother visits the priest, who maddeningly refuses to condemn the liaison in itself, and eventually she climbs the mountain to offer the Dunns money to send Ellen to Australia. They take the money but then everything is overtaken by events. Ellen has already turned down proposals from local farmers because she does not want to be doing farm work all her life. One of the attractions of Maurice for her is that he is going to leave his family farm and take her away from country life to live in a brightly-coloured house with carpets, in the city. Spoiler alert – this does not happen.
The Dunns do not go to Mass or mix with anybody, there is suicide in the family and Ellen herself cannot converse normally with people she encounters going the roads or at the market – she is constantly flaring up – so it is not difficult to understand how people might object to her marrying into any family. It is harder to understand the almost universal condemnation of the self-effacing and intelligent Kit Hennessy as a possible mate for schoolmaster John Lee in the (fictional) Kilkenny village of Drombridge in Francis MacManus’s Flow On Lovely River, published two years after O’Leary’s novel. MacManus, a teacher from Kilkenny, was a novelist, journalist and literary midwife, and his books were in print up until recently. He was one of the leading literary figures of twentieth-century Ireland.
In this novel, Kit is the daughter of impoverished hell-raiser ‘Vimy’ Hennessy, whose openness about his service in the Great War puts him beyond the pale for the other villagers in newly-independent Ireland. (Given the numbers of Irishmen who served in, and survived, that conflict, there must have been quite a lot of Vimys in the country. But maybe they weren’t all as voluble.) Fr Joe, the curate, was a ‘padre’ in the War and deplores Vimy’s ‘rejection’ (he uses that word) by the local community. However, Fr Rice, the parish priest, condemns the Hennessy house from the pulpit, for drunkenness and immorality – Kit’s sister Molly is culpable here. Kit’s only ‘fault’, then, is that she is Vimy’s daughter and Molly’s sister. She works hard, keeps a neat house, reads books and is a constant visitor to the church. Before he meets Kit, John Lee is half-heartedly courting farmer’s daughter Statia Lennon, and he goes out regularly to her home-house to help with the threshing or just waltz around the kitchen to the dry-battery wireless – liveliness, the author tells us, breaks out on the Lennons like warts. (The story is narrated in the present or immediate past tense, diary-like, by John Lee.) Then John meets Kit. Everyone, including Fr Joe, tries to get John to give Kit up, and even John’s cheerful, practical female teacher colleagues (‘Cruise’ and ‘O’Donnell’) try to ‘talk sense’ to him. John ignores them all and puts plans in motion to resign his principalship and move to Dublin, and settle there in marriage with Kit, but (spoiler alert) she chooses instead to become a lay sister in a convent in Dublin.
The attraction between Maurice and Ellen is hard to understand on any but the physical level (although physical attraction is itself a powerful force) but the attraction between John and Kit is believably conveyed from the start. It is as if they have always known each other and they pass easily from attraction and ease to deep love, where the only comfort each can find is in the other’s embrace.
Both books are beautifully written – O’Leary has a great talent not only for landscape but for house interiors and the O’Hara farmhouse is vividly described. MacManus devotes some attention to the Lennon house as well, but mainly he evokes rural Kilkenny and the River Nore at different times of the year. The song from which the book’s title is taken (The Rose of Mooncoin) refers to the Suir, we are reminded at the beginning of the novel, but the Nore flowing down through Kilkenny, Bennettsbridge, Thomastown and Inistioge (places named out more than once like beads on a rosary) is life itself flowing on regardless of people’s hopes and dreams. This might be an overworked metaphor but it works well in this book where so much of John and Kit’s courtship, such as it is, takes place on the riverbanks.
In an earlier book, also set in Drombridge (though with none of the same characters) called This House Was Mine, MacManus wrote of the downfall of the too-proud Hickeys, where the dirty tricks of a father (Michael) and son (Martin, the first-person narrator) to frustrate the marital choice of Martin’s son, John, lead to the ruin of a fine farm of land. Michael and Martin are also condemned for running two women (Martin’s mother and Martin’s wife Nell) into the ground with hard work. Flow On Lovely River is a deceptively simple story which we are supposed to read ‘against the grain’ – all the Good and Reasonable People are wrong, and even Kit is wrong for accepting their truth when she flees to her convent.
In the third Drombridge novel, Watergate, which focuses on different characters, Lee has a walk-on part as the kind of cynical schoolmaster who was lamentably common in rural Ireland (or rural anywhere, probably); Statia Lennon, however, is now a domestic science teacher in Waterford, fulfilling her stated intention of getting off the farm one way or another. At the end of Lightning Flash, some of the local ‘girls’ (not Kitty Boyle, who is not a gossip) are discussing the Maurice-Ellen story, and one says wistfully that she’d love a man to be that crazy about her. And the girls all agree that they are not the kind of women men go mad for, but they are the kind of women men marry. They acknowledge this with no satisfaction whatsoever.
Margaret O’Leary,Lightning Flash (London: Jonathan Cape 1939),
_____________I Made This House (London: Jonathan Cape 1935).
Francis MacManus, Flow On Lovely River (Dublin: Talbot Press 1941).
_____________ This House Was Mine (Dublin: Talbot Press 1937).
______________ Watergate (Dublin: Talbot Press 1942.)
‘The Rose of Mooncoin’, which is Kilkenny’s hurling anthem, was written by Watt Murphy in the mid-nineteenth century.
NOTE: I’m a historian by training and a reader all my life, but I’m not a literary critic. I am interested in writers from this period (give or take 30 or 40 years) both for their own sake – never were better yarns more compellingly spun – but also because of the insights they give, both into the way people thought at the time, and the kind of stories they enjoyed reading. Star-crossed love has been a staple of fiction and the novel in particular since the genre began, so no great claims are made for the particularity of these themes in Irish writing in English in the twentieth century. What I think is significant about these two books is the way that there cannot be a happy ending in either of them. And whatever about Maurice and the volatile Ellen in O’Leary’s book, who seem doomed before they begin, what was to stop John Lee and Kit Hennessy going off to Dublin and living happily ever after?
Clear Classic Books 
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