The State University of New York
At Potsdam
CHARLOTTE BROOKE AND LADY GREGORY:
IRISH LITERARY NATIONALIST WRITERS
By
Christine E. Neer
A Thesis
Submitted to the Faculty of
English and Communication
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree
Master of Arts
Potsdam, New York
November 2008
This thesis entitled
Charlotte Brooke and Lady Gregory:
Irish Literary Nationalist Writers
By Christine E. Neer
Has been approved for the
Department of English and Communication
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Lisa Wilson, Associate Professor
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Christine Doran, Assistant Professor
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Anthony Tyler, SUNY Distinguished
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Teaching Professor, Emeritus
The final copy of the above mentioned thesis has been examined by the signatories
and found to meet acceptable standards for scholarly work in the discipline in both
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Christine E. Neer
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Date
Abstract
Ireland’s literary response to British colonization produced two distinctly important
literary movements: antiquarian nationalism in the eighteenth century and the Irish
Literary Revival in the nineteenth. Writers in both movements explored traditional
Irish themes and images; however, antiquarian nationalists glorified a pre-colonial
national past while Literary Revivalists emphasized native, cross-cultural, and
individual experiences. Charlotte Brooke (1740-1793) published Reliques of Irish
Poetry in 1789. Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) published Cuchulain of
Muirthemne in 1902 and Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland in 1920. Each
book typifies the interests of the movement in which it was created, but all three have
unique characteristics uncommon amongst peer writing, such as Brooke’s inclusion
of original Gaelic sources and Lady Gregory’s translations from local, native Gaelic
speakers. In spite of this, Brooke and Lady Gregory are often undervalued and
misrepresented in Irish literary surveys or by literary scholars.
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Introduction
Eighteenth-century antiquarian writers studied Ireland’s historic and cultural
past; their writing explicated and glorified Ireland’s ancient history, as well as
claimed equal or superior social and cultural values to those of other parts of ancient
Europe. When used politically in the eighteenth century, by groups like the United
Irishmen, antiquarian themes–such as the strength and fortitude of an independent,
i.e., pre-colonial Ireland–became nationalist themes as well, utilized to justify
Ireland’s capacity for self-government and to refute British colonialism and colonial
values and stereotypes. Antiquarians were also fascinated with the traditional role of
the bard in Irish society and with bardic literature, studying and explicating this
literature and the bards who composed it.
One hundred years later, the defining feature of the nineteenth-century Irish
Literary Revival, also called the Irish Literary Renaissance, is that until this
movement anything categorized as “Irish literature” referred to the language, to
Gaelic, and not to the culture or history or nation of Ireland. This is the most
fascinating aspect of the Revivalist movement for modern scholars: the reclaiming,
defining, or redefining of what it means to be Irish in the nation of Ireland, as these
definitions presented inevitable dualities and hypocrisies.
Two marked features of the new literary movements throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries were the fascination with Gaelic language and culture and
the promise this language represented, and that the work being done with and for it
was done largely by English-speaking Anglo-Irish men and women. The Anglo-Irish
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were a class divided from the native Irish, separated by religious and cultural
identification with England. Their ancestors were part of the Ascendancy class, those
upper-middle- and upper-class men and women from England “planted” in Northern
Ireland in the sixteenth century by the British government. The Plantation of Ulster
planned to establish and spread British political, economic, and legal dominance of
Irish land. The Ascendancy were equally as culpable as England for suppressing and
attempting to eradicate Gaelic and its use in Ireland.
The efforts of their grandchildren to save the language is one example of the
response to a national “[i]dentification” which is “at least as complicated as identity
itself” (Trumpener 25). Eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland produced both
writers and politicians who, when Anglo-Irish, represent the attempt to iron out their
own internal struggles between English, British, and Irish national identities while
living among a demographic of physically and culturally displaced native peoples.
Charlotte Brooke was born in County Cavan in 1740. She enjoyed the fine
education an upper-class Irish family could provide but after her father’s death in
1783 she fell into comparative poverty, depending on family friends for financial
support and what money could be generated from her writing. Despite her hardships,
she published and is known for her antiquarian Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789),
popular as part of the rapidly growing cultural and literary nationalism begun in the
late eighteenth century. Isabella Augusta Persse, the future Lady Gregory, was born at
the Roxborough estate in County Galway, Connacht in 1852. Married in Ireland in
1880 and widowed in 1892, Lady Augusta Gregory returned in 1892 from London to
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Coole, her husband’s Irish estate. What began as curiosity toward the local, native
lower classes and the culture they had inherited would become an educational
journey, and then a career. Between 1892 and 1920 she learned Gaelic, studied
written and oral Irish lore, published several books on these subjects–such as
Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) and Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
(1920)–co-founded the very first Irish theatre in Dublin, The Abbey, and became a
playwright herself.
Each woman’s role in her respective movement is unique because both
women were writing within genres dominated by male writers; antiquarian
scholarship was predominantly undertaken by men, and Lady Gregory was the only
female Revivalist writer among the male canon. Brooke’s Reliques and Lady
Gregory’s folkloric work also exhibit definitive characteristics of the movements in
which they were involved, but their writing remained atypical because of their
handling of original Gaelic source material, written and oral, and because each writer
utilized traditional imagery or ideas in new ways.
The methodology Charlotte Brooke used when working on Reliques was
similar to that used by Lady Gregory for Cuchulain of Muirthemne; both women were
examining manuscripts and making translations from Gaelic sources. Brooke, without
having detailed information about her sources available, attempts to date them
herself, indicating she was familiar with a much older variant of Gaelic than was
Lady Gregory, who was studying Irish scholars and Gaelic sources which were
relatively contemporary. In response to James Macpherson’s fallacious claim of
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discovering and translating Gaelic tales from Scotland in his Fragments of Ancient
Poetry and The Poems of Ossian, Brooke printed what she calls her “originals,” the
text of the Gaelic sources she translated in Reliques, at the end of the book. She also
carefully cites each of her scholarly sources. For example, she adds a brief
“Advertisement” to her “Maon: An Irish Tale” which states, “THE story of the
following Tale is to be found in the ancient history of Ireland, and is related by
Keating, O’Halloran, Warner, &c.” (323, emphasis in original). These
“Advertisements” establish her credentials as an historian and, because of the
controversy created by Macpherson, acquit her of plagiarism should such charges
arise.
Unlike Brooke, Lady Gregory was often reading the Irish myth cycles in a
Gaelic which had been translated into other languages. She herself then translated
these texts back into English. Knowing that the consistency of the content and
language of the texts would be confused in this way, she claims she has written
Cuchulain in the idiom of the local dialogue, Kiltartan. Brooke did not choose literal
translations of her Gaelic texts either, but instead organized the text into stanzas and
wrote in stylized verse form.
Brooke’s Reliques is unique not only for its inclusion of the original Gaelic
texts but also because she has written an original poem, “Maon: An Irish Tale,” for it.
While it is based on the history of Ireland’s kings, it is not a translation nor based on
any one, specific text. Imitating the oral tale-telling tradition of the bard “Maon” is a
rare example of avowedly fictional poetry in antiquarian nationalist writing. The
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poem also exemplifies bardic nationalist conventions, and Brooke uses “Maon” to
voice her own political opinions as well as illustrate her knowledge of bardic history.
In “Maon’s” “Introduction” Brooke poses as a shy, submissive, and passive
female. Although she claims she is unequal to her fellow male antiquarian writers,
she exposes this facade when “Maon’s” narrator, the ancient bard Craftine, praises the
writing of women and “forces” Brooke to publish the “Tale.” Brooke chooses to use
Craftine as a mask for her political or literary opinions that may otherwise have
seemed too subversive for an eighteenth-century female writer.
Lady Gregory’s writing also typifies the literary interests of the Revivalists.
She published several books of Irish folklore similar to Cuchulain of Muirthemne,
and books of folk tradition. Her Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland is unique
among these; it is a collection of Lady Gregory’s transcribed conversations with
native Galway people, relating to their supernatural beliefs and experiences. To
display her acceptance and legitimacy as a friend of the native-Irish men and women
in Galway, she also included stories of her relationships with the local people in her
writing, such as her experiences searching for Biddy Early in Visions and Beliefs.
However, as an upper-class Anglo-Irish woman, and as a landlord, the disparity
between Lady Gregory’s socio-economic position and her self-presentation as a
champion of the common/native people, is evident in her writing. While she claimed
she was writing “for the people,” her lifestyle never changed, and passages within her
published works reflect these dualities.
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Charlotte Brooke and Lady Gregory are mentioned in surveys of antiquarian
writing and The Revival, respectively. However, despite their writing exemplifying
each movement’s literature, literary criticism of their work is limited or non-existent.
There are no literary critiques of Reliques of Irish Poetry. Critical examinations of
Lady Gregory’s work have been limited to her plays; her folkloric work has been
critically ignored by scholars. Scholarly writing about both Brooke and Lady Gregory
is largely biographic, and even this information is often inaccurate.
Eighteenth to Nineteenth Century Irish Literary Nationalism: Eighteenth-century
Antiquarian and Nineteenth-century Revivalist Movements
Ireland has produced for centuries a large body of Gaelic texts, manuscripts,
and books; the oldest, such as the Tain Bo Cuailgne (See Hyde, Literary History 263,
319), and the Book of Rights and the Book of the Dun Cow, pre-date the Middle Ages
by several hundred years. The invasion, occupation, and oppression of Ireland by
foreign peoples, especially the Viking invasions, which began in the eighth century
and continued through the tenth, resulted in many of these written works becoming
lost or destroyed, but what did survive would prove invaluable to the writers and
antiquarians of the eighteenth century. Irish Gaelic is also the oldest of all the variants
of the Gaelic language. Where Gaelic survived as the first or only language of the
Irish people, the old traditions survived in oral form. It is to these oral records that the
nineteenth century Revivalists would turn again and again, seeing them as the last
refuge of a decaying, dying cultural identity. Revivalists saw their own work and their
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writing romantically becoming a kind of magic well-spring from which a forgotten
people might drink and flourish and live again. Scholars often argue that the Literary
Revival began with Douglas Hyde’s founding of the Gaelic League in 1893, which
fought to preserve Ireland’s unique and individual cultural heritage through the
Gaelic language.
However, literary nationalism did not begin exclusively in the mid-late 1800s,
since Irish nationalists had created antiquarian literature in the preceding century.
Mary Helen Thuente in The Harp Re-strung, The United Irishman and the Rise of
Irish Literary Nationalism (1994) argues that the movement began in the eighteenth
century and her book claims the United Irishmen as the progenitors of it. This
organization did patronize and participate in the dissemination of written and oral
antiquarian works, but they were first and foremost a political group and their literary
and artistic activity was politically motivated and manipulable. Thuente says:
From the beginning, the United Irishmen sought to educate and
influence public opinion. In addition to numerous pamphlets and
resolutions, they published at least five songbooks, several prose
satires, and four newspapers. Political poems and song were regular
features in their newspapers. . . . The United Irishmen’s literary
nationalism was part of their larger cultural nationalism, which
included their support for the Belfast Harp Festival in 1792 and the
publication of a Gaelic magazine entitled Bolg an tSolair in 1795.
United Irish songs, drawing upon diverse sources, generated what have
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become the stereotypical images of Irish nationalism: bards, harps,
shamrocks, green flags, political martyrs, and blood sacrifice. Contrary
to popular belief, Irish literary nationalism originated with the United
Irishmen. (Thuente 2-3)
When produced politically, antiquarian literature accomplished several purposes. It
extolled the virtues of the nation’s past, a pre-conquest (i.e., pre-colonial) Ireland free
and strong, and in doing so it promoted not merely an understanding of the literature,
but also encouraged feelings of nationalism and a demand for freedom once again.
Antiquarian publications become symbols themselves, the writing therein providing
examples and reasoning why Ireland was entitled to and deserved independence from
the British Empire. The United Irishmen propagated images they, like antiquarian
writers, saw as indicative of a rich cultural heritage, but their explication of this
heritage was largely political propaganda, as seen in the promotion of martyrdom and
sacrificial violence.
Yet years before the founding of the United Irishmen in the 1790s,
antiquarians and scholars were producing literature that treated on many of these
same themes. Russell Alspach in Irish Poetry, From the English Invasion to 1798,
lists them:
an ever-increasing interest in Gaelic literature and Irish antiquities on
the part of the English-speaking Irish. . . . In 1782 . . . Charles Henry
Wilson published a volume of translations from the Gaelic; in 1785 the
Royal Irish Academy was started; in 1786 Joseph Cooper Walker’s
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Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards appeared; in 1789 . . . Charlotte
Brooke finally published her Reliques of Irish Poetry; and in 1793
James Hely published his translation of Roderic O’Flaherty’s Ogygia. .
. . In addition, Theophilus O’Flanagan was doing the preliminary work
that was to result in the publication of the Transactions of the Gaelic
Society of Dublin in 1808. Finally . . . Charles Vallancey was working
with the Gaelic language and Irish antiquities and editing the
Collectanea de Rebus Hibernicis (1770-1804). (103)
When Alspach refers to the “English-speaking Irish,” he is speaking of the AngloIrish. Clearly it was not just the United Irishmen who were diffusing a new
nationalism in the late eighteenth century. Bards and the bardic schools are a very real
part of Irish history; the United Irishmen are not solely responsible for the
propagation of bards as “stereotypical national images.” Many eighteenth century
antiquarian writers, like Brooke, were collecting old manuscripts and manuscript
material, studying bards and the Irish bardic tradition. While their work was not
necessarily a blatant indictment of British colonialism, their writing glorified an
ancient Irish past. Alspach also devotes an entire chapter to Dermod O’Connor,
whose translation of Geoffrey Keating’s early-seventeenth-century Foras Feasa Ar
Eirinn (History of Ireland) made Keating a familiar name among antiquarians
henceforth. O’Connor’s work was undertaken sometime between 1650 and 1750.
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In Bardic Nationalism, The Romantic Novel and the British Empire, Katie
Trumpener explores this trend and its implications for nationalists, and national and
antiquarian literature:
In eighteenth century Ireland, Scotland, and Wales nationalist
antiquaries edited, explicated, and promoted their respective bardic
traditions; emphasizing the cultural rootedness of bardic poetry and its
status as historical testimony, their work represents a groundbreaking
attempt to describe literature as the product of specific cultural
institutions and to understand literary form as a product of a particular
national history. (4)
The bard, unlike Cuchulain or Finn, is a tangible figure from Ireland’s ancient,
historic, and recent past. In antiquarian literature, the belief in “cultural rootedness”
and “historical testimony” manifests in the reoccurring insistence on the elevated
social and cultural status of bards, the study and explication of their role as oral
record-keepers and tale-tellers, and even, as with Brooke, a fascination with their
mystical or supernatural reputations. Furthermore, antiquarians, as scholars and
writers, intrinsically exemplify these same literary traditions by simultaneously
identifying with the bard, preserving the literature of the past, and creating a kind of
new-traditional literature.
The problem this ideology presents, as Trumpener says, is that it catches
antiquarians (and common, native people) between an idealized idea of the past and a
dubious present:
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When cultures change, nationalists argue, it is often due to the
violence of outside forces, rather than any inevitable, internal dynamic.
The English conquest of Ireland . . . involved deliberate attempts to
eradicate traditional forms of culture in order to root out remaining
sources of indigenous identity and national pride. Such suppressions
lead to the lasting psychic and intellectual dislocation of the colonized.
Unable, under English occupation, to rebuild their shattered cultural
institutions, they are unwilling, at the same time, to adapt themselves
to the conquerors’ way of life. Their refusal to relinquish the memory
of a preconquest society dooms them, personally and collectively, to a
shadowy half-life, caught between past and present. Yet this refusal
also keeps alive the hope of future autonomy and decisively blocks the
conquerors’ narratives of triumph and progress. (29)
Eighteenth-century nationalist literature turns to antiquity, to a time when Ireland was
an independent country with laws and a system of government instituted and
supported by Irish kings and queens. A “half-life” is apparent where writers and
activists are more concerned with this ancient national identity, rather than with
suggesting relevant social or political changes. Lower- and agrarian-class men and
women were economically and socially unable to advance; among them the loss of
“indigenous identity” was acutely felt and they became tenaciously attached to the
romanticized image of Ireland’s past. Organizations that utilized antiquarian themes
supported socially autonomous thinking in their appeal to a disenfranchised people.
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One hundred years later the writing of the Revivalists would, sometimes naively,
denounce what they saw as self-pitying attitudes, believing psychological and
national independence can only be achieved when the Irish stop blaming their
grievances on externalities and actively take on the responsibility of personal and
national change themselves.
A simplified example of the romanticized “half-life” Trumpener discusses can
be found in Nicholas Canny’s essay on “Early Modern Ireland,” in the 1989 Oxford
Illustrated History of Ireland. Of native-Irish psychology from the mid-eighteenth
century, Canny observes:
while many [native Irish occupiers of the land] had learned to speak
English they remained conversant in the Irish language, providing
patronage to priests and Gaelic poets. Thus they received constant
reminders that they were the descendants of glorious ancestors who
had been wrongfully dispossessed of their rights and property during
the century of confiscations–making way for Protestant intruders who
had no legitimate claim to the estates which sustained them in wealth
and luxury. . . . there was probably no other society in Europe where
the propagation of the message was so institutionalized as it was in
Ireland, nor any other where the belief was so generally fixed in the
minds of the peasantry that they were the dispossessed who would one
day recover that of which they had been so unjustly deprived. (159)
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In many ways the native Irish had been “wrongfully dispossessed,” their disgust with
the Anglo-Irish and the British tenable. Yet Canny’s descriptions of the
“institutionalized” “constant reminders” of their peers are more examples of
Trumpener’s consequent “shadowy half-life” in which these people became trapped.
The image of the tyrannical overthrow of Ireland’s ancient glory-days also made
activism that sanctioned violence appealing and justifiable; often aggressive
eighteenth and nineteenth century groups and secret societies that lashed out
sporadically were composed of lower-class men and farmers, such as the Whiteboys,
Rightboys, and Ribbonmen.
Bardic Nationalism also examines James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient
Poetry (1760) and The Poems of Ossian from the 1760s. Trumpener, like other
scholars, points out Ossian’s role in the bourgeoning antiquarian pop-culture of the
late eighteenth century, as it enjoyed terrific, wide-spread popularity in England and
Scotland. Ossian and Ossianic poetry generated immediate and long-term responses
from Irish, Scottish, and English antiquarian and antiquarian nationalist writers.
Macpherson’s claim that his was a work of translation, of such pre-medieval Scottish
tales and poetry as could be found in the county’s extant traditional culture (both
written and oral) did not hold for very long with contemporary critics and
antiquarians, especially in Ireland. Alspach remarks, “The feeling toward Macpherson
in Ireland was mostly one of irritation, for it was felt that he had dressed Cuchulin
and Finn in the kilt and plaid besides winding the strands of the two great sagas into a
Gordian knot” (97). Essentially he had. Because Macpherson was unable and/or
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reluctant to produce the original sources of his “translations,” they were quickly
recognized by eighteenth century antiquarian scholars as bits and pieces of Irish and
Celtic legend borrowed, altered, and embellished with his own creative writing. Also,
by claiming his “originals” pre-dated the Middle Ages, he was implicitly criticizing
and refuting Irish antiquarian collectors and translators, pronouncing Scottish culture
and literary saga as the bole from which traditional Irish literature sprung and
branched (Trumpener 75).
What Macpherson’s writing can take credit for is the vehement response from
antiquarian writers–writers both enamored of and disgusted by his work. It inspired
and influenced many similar late-eighteenth-century works; the hunt for, the
collection of, and the preservation and publication of traditional tales and national
history became all the rage among Anglo- Irish and Scottish antiquarian scholars. In
Ireland especially, where indignation towards Macpherson was strongest, writers like
Walker and Brooke were responding to him and to Ossian with their own vindicating
collections of ancient Irish history and traditional writing. Brooke’s inclusion in
Reliques of the original Gaelic texts from which she translated is a response to
Macpherson’s posing. It establishes her authorial legitimacy as well as evinces the
legitimacy of her nation’s literary history.
The antiquarian trend of nationalist writing in the eighteenth century explored
Ireland’s ancient culture through texts which were either available in translation or, as
in Brooke’s case, writers studied and translated medieval to seventeenth century
Gaelic texts on their own. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary
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nationalism studied the ancient traditions that poetry, saga, and historical documents
recorded, eighteenth-century collections and publications of these specific texts and
records meant a lack of original creative writing. Historical record naturally included
legend and superstition, but generally antiquarians were not writing creative works of
their own. As discussed above, even Ossian was marketed as historical translation.
Because most of the Revivalists in the nineteenth century were Anglo-Irish,
members of the upper-class who had ready access to eighteenth-century books, they
drew on those sources and utilized that information in their writing, but they reformed it selectively around nineteenth-century literary interests. These interests–
their fascination with folk-lore and the so-called invisible world and interest in nativeIrish cultural experiences–as well as their exploration of and dependence on oral
material, and a wealth of creative writing, are marked differences from the writing of
the previous century’s antiquarians. The Literary Revivalists also understood, in part,
that Ireland’s cultural identity–and consequently national identity–was defined and
strengthened not only by a separatist idea of national self, but also by shared and
synthesized cross-cultural experiences. Irish folkloric and mythological themes
remained throughout the Revival, but writing in its later years became increasingly
interested in the expression of the personal experience; the experience of Irish life, as
with Lady Gregory’s plays; and with understanding the history and future of Ireland
as married to the present.
The Role of the Anglo-Irish in Irish Literary Movements
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The Anglo-Irish represent the class of people whose ancestors began the slow,
arduous process of converting the Gaelic-speaking/Catholic/agrarian land-owning
majority of Ireland to English speech, belief, and economy. They were Englishspeaking Protestants loyal to the Crown, often landed gentry descended from
landlords. Their forefathers, those “planted” Englishman of the sixteenth to
seventeenth centuries who became the Ascendancy class, supported or passed laws
that disabled Catholics from owning property and from participating in government;
they claimed ownership of the land, usurping the predominantly native-Irish small
farmer and cottier class, and, as landed gentry, demanded rents. Eviction (one of
several factors contributing to mass emigration in the nineteenth century), dislocation,
and Anglicization systematically suppressed the Gaelic language. So how and why,
almost three hundred years after the beginning of the British colonization of Ireland,
were the Anglo-Irish initiating and leading a literary revolution which re-animated
this language and glorified traditional Irish culture?
The Anglo-Irish represented not only an economic distinction from the native
Irish but a cultural one as well. They identified with England and Englishness in the
same way many of the native Irish from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries came
to harbor an idea of unique Irishness. Even so, in the eighteenth century opposing
economic and political views among the Anglo-Irish created class tension. Desirous
of keeping power for themselves, rather than having their industries and profits
governed by England, many of the Anglo-Irish opted for their own government,
independent from England but still representative of a loyal British colony. Within
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their society, a growing feeling of estrangement from England as a political body and
a growing awareness that they were not wholly English and neither were they wholly
Irish, was creeping in. This crisis of identity was punctuated by The Act of Union in
1800 which finally disabled their attempts at self-government: “When the mother
country systematically destroyed their industries and by the Act of Union in 1800
abolished their parliament, the gap between English and Anglo-Irish was nearly as
great as that between Irish and Anglo-Irish” (Greene xxx).1 Declan Kiberd in
Inventing Ireland furthers this point:
The Act of Union in 1800, which yoked the two countries together
under the Parliament in London, represented a further integration of
Ireland into English political life. It was the official response to the
rebellion of 1798, a bloody uprising supported by radical
Presbyterians, disgruntled Catholics and secular republicans. (20)
The United Irishmen, who were a non-exclusive organization, were responsible for
the violent 1798 uprising, which was suppressed with retaliatory violence. Seen as a
direct and negative response to the push for an Irish parliament independent of British
rule or authority, the Act of Union represented a major turning point in the ideology
of revolutionary Anglo-Irish. David Greene remarks that, “[h]enceforth the great
rebel leaders for a whole century from Wolfe Tone to Parnell were to be, with few
exceptions, Anglo-Irishmen” (xxx).
Of course activism, conservative or radical, was not embraced by the entire
Anglo-Irish class, and many of the Ascendancy remained politically and
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economically loyal to Britain, living and working in both England and Ireland, and in
some cases British colonies far abroad as well, as did Sir William Gregory in Ceylon
and Egypt.2 Many were also members of the British Parliament. Furthermore, with
notable exceptions like the United Irishmen, new energy turned toward the goal of
Irish political independence did not necessarily represent empathy with the peasantry.
It was the self-interest of Anglo-Irish land and business owners that often determined
their involvement in support of governmental de-colonization of Ireland.
Trumpener feels many activists gradually turned to more satisfying
expressions of dissension and resistance because most of the extreme political
activism of the eighteenth century did not produce any long-term, stable political
progress:
Another founder of the United Irishmen, William Drennan, was tried
for seditious libel in 1794, and there-after turned to poetry as his
principle mode of political expression, moving from a revolutionary
nationalism back to a bardic one. In the wake of the 1790s, as
Drennan’s case suggests, a radical cultural nationalism continued to
sustain itself in the way that (and partly because) a radical political
nationalism could not. (11)
This is another example of the United Irishmen’s manipulation of literary culture for
political purposes. The return to bardic themes had cross-cultural appeal as nationalist
literature; to activists it continued to represent subversive political activism but it was
physically and politically safer.
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The evolution of Anglo-Irish social-reformists developed in much the same
way radical political activists turned to literature. Trumpener continues:
late-eighteenth-and-early-nineteenth-century cultural nationalisms
found important supporters and advocates not only among those
directly oppressed or disfranchised but also among intellectuals who,
by virtue of ethnic, religious, regional, or occupational background,
might have been expected to oppose them. In Ireland, especially, some
of the most impassioned denunciations of English imperialism and
some of the most dedicated attempts at literary restitution come from
Anglo-Irish antiquaries and novelists; convinced of the intertwined
destinies of Catholics, Anglicans, and Presbyterians, Milesian peasants
and Ascendancy gentry, they work to explicate a past full of ethnic
shame. Nationalist movements may have found their emotional center
in the memory of ethnic suffering, but they also move and mobilize
sympathizers beyond the ethnic groups most directly affected. (25)
The Anglo-Irish who struggled for independence throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries came to realize that their economy in turn depended on the (often
native) Irish class majority of laborers and farmers, and that to increase their own
freedom they would have to sympathize with and use the power of the lower classes
who sustained their lifestyle. The “intellectuals” of the mid-to-late nineteenth century
would continue the work of antiquarian nationalists, but their attention to the
“intertwined destinies” of their class and the native classes evolves from an increasing
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curiosity toward their own mixed heritage. By the late-nineteenth-century the
descendants of the Ascendancy were a culturally estranged class, with the animosity
of the native Irish on one side of them, and the indifference of the British Empire on
the other. At this point in Irish literary history writing moves away from
antiquarianism to an interest in defining “self,” national as well as individual, and
attempts to understand how the individual is part of the national “self.” Anglo-Irish
writing which attempts to define Ireland also represents self-definition. Kiberd is
speaking of the Revivalists when he says:
A highly-educated younger generation, finding few positions available
commensurate with its abilities or aspirations, was about to turn to
writing as a means of seeking power: out of the strange mixture of
backwardness and forwardness everywhere, it would forge one of the
most formally daring and experimental literatures of the modern
movement. (24)
The Literary Revivalists not only created national and personal images, they also
manage to create literal “positions” for their interests, as with Yeats and Lady
Gregory and the founding of the first national Irish theatre. Kiberd also says, “[t]he
revival of the native language, led by the Gaelic League in the final decade of the
[nineteenth] century, was an inevitable protest against such [linguistic]
homogenization, a recognition that to be anglicized was not at all the same thing as to
be English” (2). This “daring” group of Anglo-Irish upperclassmen also positioned
themselves culturally between native Irish speakers and British academics, combating
Neer 24
the anglicization of Ireland’s native language and arguing for its intrinsic national
value. Unlike the focus of eighteenth-century antiquarian writing, which looks
behind, “backward,” to an ancient/pre-colonial past, nineteenth-century Revivalist
writing crafts a new Irish experience through literary expression which relies,
ironically, on the rejection of colonial ideology and on the comradery between native
and Anglo-Irish peoples.
The Role of Gaelic in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Irish Literature: Language
and Translation
Gaelic is the gate-keeper to a very old oral and written cultural past, national
identity, and literary tradition. Therefore, England’s attempt to destroy the native
language of the native Irish population, a process begun with Irish colonization in the
seventeenth century, had more dangerous implications than physical oppression could
alone. The repression of the language was systematic. Ireland, as part of the British
Empire, was slowly stripped of the Gaelic names of roads, rivers, towns, natural
landmarks, etc., and these names were replaced with English ones. After Cromwell’s
campaign against the Irish in the mid-seventeenth century, the small portion of the
native population who were allowed to retain their rights were pushed into the
western province of Connacht; here, and also on the Aran Islands, the native language
survived. When a young Charlotte Brooke began to study Gaelic in eighteenthcentury County Cavan, located in the north, the reduced number of Gaelic speakers
belonged now to the peasant and lower classes. By the time Lady Gregory, living in
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County Galway, Connacht, endeavored to learn Gaelic, this was the bleak reality:
“preservation becomes most obvious in the nineteenth century when the language was
almost gone and the population largely dispersed, because the tradition was literally
fighting for its life, and only a handful of people . . . were even aware of its existence”
(F. O’Connor 6). The Great Famine of the mid-nineteenth century had the most
devastating effects on the lower classes, the people who still spoke and read Gaelic;
almost two-thirds of this demographic in the Irish population either starved or
emigrated.
Before the seventeenth century, Irish oral literary traditions were not only
practiced or retained by the peasantry, and neither was Gaelic literature solely oral in
nature. As was true elsewhere in medieval Europe, written literature belonged to an
elite class of religious officials. When traditional tales were written down in Ireland,
they were in the form of manuscripts, created predominantly in pre-medieval Irish
monasteries, then centers of spirituality, learning, and art. Ireland also boasted bardic
schools as late as the seventeenth century (Greene xxii). The ancient courts of pagan
and Christian kings kept bards as living textbooks; bardic study and recitation
included the laws of the land and the genealogy of the monarchy. Ancient tradition
holds that bards held an elite place in society and were taken into battle to recite,
compose, and to boost morale.
For the Anglo-Irish wanting to break from a mono-cultural English identity,
the promise of Gaelic and its traditions was clear. Antiquarian scholars and
organizations like the United Irishmen in Brooke’s lifetime, and the Gaelic League in
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Lady Gregory’s, realized the iconic importance of the Gaelic language as intrinsic to
a unique Irish culture. Walker and Brooke recognized that Gaelic was key to Ireland’s
past and Lady Gregory, Hyde, Synge, and Yeats believed that it was the key to the
minds of the native people. Alspach connects the new literary interests of the AngloIrish to traditional Irish literature in this way:
But despite this worshipping of things English by the vast majority of
the Anglo-Irish, an increasing number of them during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries began to grow aware of a large body of native
legend and story as it was made available to them through translation. .
. . And for the first time, as it were, [the Anglo-Irish] looked about
them, and they found this pleasant green island teeming with
superstition and old story. . . . They began to listen to the queer idiom
that the native Irish, who had learned English during their lifetime,
used when they tried to bend the thoughts of their race into the new
tongue. When the Irish poets began to use in their poetry this matter of
Ireland: the myths, the legends, the superstitions, the countryside; and
when they expressed themselves in rhythms different from the rhythms
of English poetry: rhythms they learned by listening to the speech of
the peasants, then Irish poetry took on distinction of meaning. (11)
This “queer idiom that the native Irish . . . used when they tried to bend the thoughts
of their race into the new tongue” is the Kiltartan of Lady Gregory’s Visions and
Beliefs in the West of Ireland and of her plays. The name of the idiom is taken from
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the “village on the Gregory estate of Coole Park near Gort, Co. Galway” (McMahon
and O’Donoghue 436). In the west Lady Gregory was in the happy position of living
next to a people who were bilingual or who kept Irish as their first, in some cases
only, language. The “distinction of meaning” in Anglo-Irish writing is not only an
antiquarian exploration of Irish themes, but also Revivalist experimentation with
cadences that reflect the unique rhythm and tone of Gaelic literature, “translated,” as
it were, into the foreign language of English. The language of their writing, as with
Lady Gregory’s choice of the Kiltartan dialect, is an attempt to transfer the energy
and power of Gaelic as a literary predecessor into new works and a new language.
This English language then becomes a new medium; not Gaelic, but still Irish. While
Alspach points out that Anglo-Irish writers were “growing aware” of translated Irish
literature, an understanding of written and spoken Gaelic exposed a wealth of primary
source material for authors such as Brooke and Lady Gregory and their own original
writing.
The Anglo-Irish relationship with Gaelic from the mid-eighteenth to latenineteenth centuries is problematic. By the nineteenth century Gaelic oral traditions
and the spoken language belonged to the people who were now the Irish peasant
class, and a majority of the texts written in Irish were housed in colleges and
institutions or, after collection became popular, in the Big Houses–Anglo-Irish
Ascendancy estates. Glorifying though it was, writing which depended on either of
these sources was done by the Anglo-Irish upper-classes for the Anglo-Irish upperclasses: they were the literate class, had the money to buy books and/or the capital to
Neer 28
publish their own. Although literacy and education were improving among the poorer
class in Lady Gregory’s lifetime (due in large part to the Gaelic League) and although
some among the poor were in possession of Gaelic manuscripts, these people had
neither the time nor capital to compose or publish major written works, nor the
invitation or encouragement from (Anglo-Irish) institutions like Trinity College,
Dublin. Lady Gregory collected an impressive body of oral material from the
peasantry, but she was not publishing her findings for those whose native language
made so much of her work possible. She claims she is, as when she dedicates her
Cuchulain of Muirthemne to the common “people of Kiltartan” (5):
My Dear Friends, / When I began to gather these stories together, it
is of you I was thinking, that you would like to have them and to be
reading them. . . . And I am very glad to have something that is worth
offering you, for you have been very kind to me ever since I came over
to you from Kilchriest, two-and-twenty years ago. (5-6)
The “people of Kiltartan” are the laborers, farmers, and working classes surrounding
Coole, her estate in Galway. Many of them are the same people she quotes in Visions
and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. Lady Gregory would not have seriously suspected,
despite her dedication, that these men and women of Kiltartan were going to purchase
Cuchulain or Visions and Beliefs. Although the peasant class is often utilized as a
primary source for traditional literary material, there is a lack of direct, first-person
narratives, in Irish or in English, from these very people.
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Also, The Anglo-Irish spoke English; only a scant number of Anglo-Irish
writers ever bothered to learn spoken or written Gaelic. Although Alspach’s
aforementioned list of eighteenth-century translators (103) seems to suggest a large
proportion of antiquarian writers and scholars were literate in Gaelic, in reality the
majority of them were not. They, and the majority of the Revivalists, were
exclusively English-speaking, dependant on the translations of their predecessors or
peers when studying Gaelic and Irish history. Obviously the writing of these men and
women was necessarily going to be done in English. The few who understood Gaelic
were themselves also writing in English; they were appealing to a peer, Englishspeaking audience. Brooke’s contemporaries, in particular, recognized that many of
the texts they studied were the products of an oral tradition centuries old, but because
they had book translations, most of these same antiquarians remained in ignorance of
the Gaelic language; this made literal conversations with native speakers neither
necessary nor possible.
The formation of the Gaelic League in 1893 represented the first formal reintroduction of the Irish language in Ireland since the destruction and replacement of
the Gaelic Order in the early 1600s. It presented the Gaelic language as inherent to
the Irish experience. Its creator, Douglas Hyde, aimed to restore Irish as the national
language of Ireland, believing national pride and self-instilled worth in the native
people would prove inevitable consequences. The League made open pride in self and
country acceptable for peasants and gentry alike, brought an appreciation of the
language back to the forefront of cultural identity, and may very possibly have saved
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it from extinction in Ireland, as it generated new groups and new generations of
readers and speakers. Even today Gaelic is (though not without some controversy) a
mandatory subject in the Republic schools.
But of the definitive writers who shaped the nineteenth-century Revival, only
a few spoke or understood Gaelic fluently. Hyde was proficient and he stipulated that
the Irish should speak and read only Gaelic; he even earned a kind of honorary Gaelic
name from native speakers.3 Lady Gregory proved uncannily insightful as she began
to learn Gaelic several times on her own before 1893, eventually applying for tutelage
from the local Catholic clergy when she could get it. Synge in his youth had studied
Irish at Trinity College. But with regard to Yeats and AE (George Russell) their
understanding of Gaelic was minimal if they had any at all. The traditional knowledge
Yeats gleaned for his early fantastic writing was dependant on the translated work of
others, oral or written.
In light of the Anglo-Irish relationship with the Irish language, Brooke’s work
was revolutionary and Lady Gregory’s exceptional. Brooke included the original
Gaelic writing from which she translated, as she found it in her manuscript sources,
and in the Gaelic script, pre-dating Hyde’s writing in Love Songs of Connacht (1893)
by over one hundred years.4 Lady Gregory was a translator and also a playwright; she
composed many plays in the idiom of the people of Kiltartan, which represented, as
Alspach mentions, a synthesis of Gaelic and English, and she chose this idiom for
several of her translations as well.
Neer 31
Approaches to Translation in Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques and Lady Gregory’s Work
Although Charlotte Brooke produced only one, singular antiquarian work, a
collection of translations from Gaelic sources, it presents a well researched and
thoroughly thought-out survey of Irish literature, including the ancient tales of
Cuchulain and the Red Branch and Finn and the Fianna, as well as odes, elegies, and
songs. She concludes Reliques of Irish Poetry with a tale of her own, the events and
characters taken from tradition and re-spun in her own stylized verses. Lady Gregory
spent over a decade seeking out, recording, and collecting folk- traditions,
superstitions, and stories from the tenantry of Coole and the people who lived in the
country-sides and villages of Galway. The collection of these folk-conversations
became Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, published in 1920, but more than a
decade before the publication of Visions and Beliefs, Lady Gregory published
Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902) and Gods and Fighting Men (1904), both
collections of the traditional epic tales involving Cuchulain and Finn and the
characters found in their heroic adventures.
Most of Brooke’s translations in Reliques were made, she says, from
manuscripts she had borrowed or copied from friends, friends who were also
interested in and publishing antiquarian volumes of Irish history. She read their
books, quoting extensively from them in her own, and she includes the Gaelic text of
what she calls her “originals” after the body of her translations. But, she only records
that these same friends have the original manuscripts in their possession and she does
not discuss how they acquired them. As far as modern research has explored Brooke’s
Neer 32
writing, these specific physical manuscripts have not been found, or, at least, among
present extant manuscripts, none have been assigned as the “originals” she studied.
Testimonial repetition, therefore, and her inclusion of the Gaelic text, seem to have
been enough satisfactory evidence to support her claim in its time, and have
continued to be enough to date.
Brooke precedes each poem or chapter in Reliques with an “Advertisement”
and it is often in these where she cites or credits her sources. For example, in the
“Advertisement” for “Conloch: A Poem” Brooke writes:
I HAVE not been able to discover the Author of the Poem of
CONLOCH, nor can I ascertain the exact time in which it was written;
but it is impossible to avoid ascribing it to a very early period, as the
language is so much older than that of any of my Originals, (the War
Odes excepted,) and quite different from the style of those Pieces
which are known to be the compositions of the middle ages. (2,
emphasis in original)
By including the information about the dating of the poem, she is evincing her own
scholarly research, subtly refuting claims like Macpherson’s that Scottish literature
pre-dates that of pre-medieval Ireland. “Ascribing it to a very early period” makes
both her inability to “discover the Author” and the poem’s antiquarian value more
credible. Her language also asserts that she attempted to authorize the poem, another
refutation of Macpherson’s claim to have discovered and translated tradition Scottish
poetry in Ossian. Brooke carefully avoids the accusations and criticism which
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accompanied his work by including information which vindicates her research and
the authenticity of her sources.
In the “Advertisement” for “The Chase: A Poem” Brooke supports her work
by including the names of respected contemporary scholars:
Mr. Walker . . . adds his regret that he was not possessed of a
complete copy of The Chase; but I afterwards procured one from
Maurice Gorman, of this city (a professor of the Irish language), and
from that copy I have made my translation. (71, emphasis in original)
“Mr. Walker” is Joseph Cooper Walker, a close friend of Brooke, who published
Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards in 1786, and often utilized Brooke as a
translator for his primary Gaelic source material. Citing Gorman, “a professor of the
Irish language,” validates the accuracy of her translations. Dropping Walker’s name,
as he is an antiquarian scholar, serves the same purpose; he is endorsing her work.
Referencing learned men in her book argues for the quality and authenticity of her
writing.
The “Advertisement” for “Moira Borb: A Poem” also mentions Walker and
Gorman, and includes further evidence of her scholarly research and her attempt at
dating and authorization:
THE original of this poem is in the hands of Maurice Gorman: there is
also another copy in Mr. Walker’s collection, but not altogether so
perfect as the one from which this translation has been made. Neither
of these copies are dated, nor can we discover the author. Like most of
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the Finian poems, it is ascribed to Oisin; but, though it may, possibly,
have originated with him, it has certainly assumed, since that period, a
different form from any that he could have given it. The poetry, indeed,
breathes all the spirit of the Finian Bard; but the language is evidently
not earlier than that of the middle ages. (Brooke 119, emphasis in
original)
Her discussion of Finian poetry and her familiarity with its age and style is evidence
of an extensive knowledge of the Gaelic language. “Old Irish” (AD 600-900) and
“Middle Irish” (AD 900-1200) are dissimilar from the spoken Gaelic Brooke would
have heard in the late eighteenth century, and Old Irish is very difficult to learn and
understand (Figgis 115-16). The ability to read Old and Middle Gaelic is a
tremendous testament to her scholarship, and such claims would have been obvious to
her fellow scholars. By comparing texts of differing styles and ages, Brooke is also
making her readers aware that she has done thorough research.
How far Brooke was able to study entire Gaelic texts is uncertain. She never
makes mention of her father’s library, but given Henry Brooke’s literary
accomplishments and his interest in Irish history and literature (Ashley vi-vii), it is
not an unfounded suspicion that he would have owned written antiquarian material in
English and in Gaelic, thus giving Charlotte a fair beginning to her research. In the
“Advertisement” for “Ode On A Ship” Brooke states, “For the original of the
following Ode I am indebted to Mr. O’Flanagan of Trinity College” (179, emphasis in
original). Mr. O’Flanagan is the same Theophilus O’Flanagan Alspach has mentioned
Neer 35
in Irish Poetry and whom Brooke has down in her list of subscribers–the eighteenth
century antiquarian scholar. Gorman and O’Flanagan could have made the Gaelic
documents housed in the archives of learned institutions available to her; it is possible
with these connections she was also able to visit Trinity College and it was there she
was endeavoring “to discover and ascertain” (Brooke 2) the correct authors and dates
of her sources. Brooke’s comments suggest that she had researched and studied
enough other sources to compare her texts to and to infer from; she repeatedly avers
attempts at correct dating through such comparisons. Unfortunately she omits such
detailed information from Reliques, and the information in the “Advertisements” only
hints at her activities and efforts.
Lady Gregory has also published accounts of her trials translating Gaelic
sources. In the chapter “The Epics” from Lady Gregory’s autobiography Seventy
Years, 1852-1922, Lady Gregory discusses her work translating texts for Cuchulain
of Muirthemne and Gods and Fighting Men. Able to afford a small apartment in
London after the death of Sir William, she made good use of the British Museum, and
in Ireland, she frequented the libraries and archives of the Royal Irish Academy and
the National Library. Of her studies, she records:
I was not scholar enough to read ancient manuscript, but the Irish text
of most of the stories had already been printed, and I worked from this
text with the help of the translations given. The text of “The War for
the Bull of Cuailgne” had not been printed as a whole, and I worked
by comparing and piecing together various versions. . . . I added but a
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connecting sentence where necessary, but I condensed and transposed,
and I left out some passages that have changed their meaning. For
when we are told of Cuchulain’s “distortion” one knows that the
meaning was that the battle-anger upon him made him different from
his fellows, transfigured him to something above and beyond the
ordinary, the natural man. (Seventy Years 392)
Her admission that she was unable “to read ancient manuscript” suggests that Lady
Gregory had, like Brooke, seen texts written in Old or Middle Gaelic, but unlike
Brooke, she was incapable of translating them. The “Irish text already printed” would
refer to the modern form of Gaelic which existed and developed after the mideighteenth century (Figgis 116). She was able, then, to translate a more contemporary
Gaelic, but these translations were not literal ones if they were “condensed and
transposed” and edited.
The fidelity of her translations is further complicated by her use of Gaelic
material which had been translated into additional languages, as well as into English.
She writes:
I spent some time working at documents in the British Museum and
the Royal Irish Academy. My old knowledge of German was now of
great use to me, for German scholars had taken up the task despised by
our own Trinity professors. I used to spend all my day at the British
Museum. (Seventy Years 393)
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The attitude of many “Trinity professors” that Gaelic literature had no inherent value,
and the subsequent neglect of it in their studies, incurred bitter criticism from Irish
writers and scholars like Lady Gregory and Hyde (Gregory, Seventy Years 391; Hyde,
Literary History xiii-xv). In contrast, the British Museum and the Royal Irish
Academy apparently housed translations of Irish texts that had been done by German
scholars, Celticists, and philologists. Lady Gregory cites their work, and also the
work of a French scholar, as sources in Cuchulain’s “Notes”: Windisch’s Irische
Texte, Zimmer’s Keltische Studien, and De Jubainville’s Epopee Celtique (271-72).
She was fluent in the German language; she had learned it in the years before her
marriage to Sir William (Gregory, Seventy Years 19). But how faithfully the original
Irish words and wording remained–translated into German or French, and from these
languages, translated back into English–is a problem which Lady Gregory was aware
of, although in her autobiography she does not directly acknowledge it. In the
introduction to Cuchulain, the “Dedication of the Irish Edition to the People of
Kiltartan,” she briefly mentions these complexities:
When I went looking for the stories in the old writings, I found that the
Irish in them is too hard for any person to read that has not made a
long study of it. Some scholars have worked well at them, Irishmen
and Germans and Frenchmen, but they have printed them in the old
cramped Irish, with translations into German or French or English, and
these are not easy for you to get, or to understand, and the stories
themselves are confused, every one giving a different account from the
Neer 38
others in some small thing, the way there is not much pleasure in
reading them. (5)
Lady Gregory offers the “People of Kiltartan,” the common people in Galway, these
explanations for the choices she made in translation. Because the readers of Seventy
Years would have been her peer-class and fellow authors, to them, she dignifies her
study of other languages in her autobiography, but the “Dedication” reflects her trials
translating from linguistically diverse sources. Using texts and translations in several
different languages inevitably produces “a different account from the others in some
small thing,” but it is only in this paragraph that she acknowledges it.
As to the dates of the texts Lady Gregory studied for Cuchulain, with few
exceptions she focused on recent translations and copies of Gaelic texts by men who
were studying Irish tales, history, and language. At the end of Cuchulain she includes
in a section entitled “Notes,” “a list of the authorities I have been chiefly helped by in
putting these stories together” (Cuchulain 271). Under a listing of Cuchulain’s
chapters, she cites the authors or scholars that she referenced for each, but she only
includes their names, usually last name only, and a brief, un-dated title of their work.
Included in her references are scholars Eugene O’Curry, Alfred Nutt, Kuno Meyer,
and Whitley Stokes, as well as Douglas Hyde and Standish Hayes O’Grady. All of
these men were Lady Gregory’s contemporaries; O’Curry accomplished much of his
scholarly work for Ireland from 1843 to 1856, she was acquainted with Nutt and
Meyer, Hyde was a personal friend, and S. H. O’Grady was her cousin. The German
Neer 39
scholar Windisch collaborated with Irishman and fellow scholar Whitley Stokes on
the four-volume, German-published Irische Texte (1880-1909).
She did study a handful of older texts. Lady Gregory was familiar with
Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry, and she cites it as a source for Cuchulain’s chapter
“The Only Son of Aoife,” but Brooke’s is the only eighteenth-century antiquarian text
she includes in Cuchulain’s references.5 The oldest texts she examined were
Keating’s History of Ireland (Gaelic–Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn) and the Tain Bo
Cuailgne, the “Cattle Raid of Cooley,” that dates as early as the seventh or eighth
centuries (See Hyde, Literary History 319).
Of her studying the Tain Bo Cuailgne, Lady Gregory writes, from a journal
entry dated May 18, 1901 and published in her autobiography:
“Yeats has been to the Royal Irish Academy and seen the manuscript
translation of the Tain I had heard of, and thinks it will serve for my
purpose. A great relief, for I was beginning to feel the want of the
great central tale to work at, and if I could not have got the Tain all my
work would have had to lie by.” (Seventy Years 398)
Later, on May 29, 1901, she writes, “‘At the R.I. Academy, and saw the MSS. of Tain
Bo which I think will do quite nicely. I am to apply for leave to have it copied’“
(Seventy Years 399). In Cuchulain’s “Notes” Lady Gregory cites the Royal Irish
Academy’s manuscripts which she referenced for “War for the Bull of Cuailgne”:
“MS. translations by O’Daly in Royal Irish Academy; MS. translations by O’Looney
in Royal Irish Academy” (272). The “manuscript translation of the Tain [she] had
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heard of,” and the manuscripts she examines and cites “in the Royal Irish Academy”
are presumably the same sources; however, in neither her “Notes” nor her
autobiography does Lady Gregory offer the dates of either the original manuscripts or
the dates of the translations. She could not have read the twelfth-century manuscript,
but she fails to mention if she had seen it, and there is no additional mention of
“O’Daly” and “O’Looney” in her autobiography or other writing.
As with Brooke, minimal bibliographic information makes an identification of
Lady Gregory’s manuscript sources very difficult. Without specific names and dates,
or extensive occupational information, modern scholars have a difficult time placing
translators, professors, etc., who were not authors themselves. The inability of
eighteenth and nineteenth century scholarship and research to assert absolute dates for
centuries-old sources is understandable, but where Brooke, and particularly Lady
Gregory, have omitted available information on their sources, modern scholars are
forced to rely on speculation and supposition. Lady Gregory’s autobiography often
represents a journal of candid thought; although she briefly discusses her scholarly
sources, the focus of her memoir was not an explication of them. Because both
Reliques and Cuchulain were written for specific audiences, Brooke and Lady
Gregory could take advantage of the knowledge and familiarity those audiences
already had with the authors and scholars they have mentioned. Referencing
contemporary scholarship and examining historic texts not only authenticates their
research, but also shows Brooke and Lady Gregory to be scholars themselves.
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Cuchulain of Muirthemne, and later Gods and Fighting Men, depended mostly
on manuscript translations and scholarly texts.6 While at Coole, Lady Gregory was
offered several manuscripts from local farmers or workers who had had them, for an
uncounted amount of time, in their households. She also traveled throughout Galway,
intentionally seeking information from the common people, and often these people
were Gaelic speakers; in her Gods and Fighting Men, Lady Gregory listened to the
oral tale-telling tradition of native Irish men and women to supply her with more
characterization for the legendary figures of Finn and the Fianna. Of the Fenian7
legends she writes in her journal, sometime between 1902 and 1904:
what I could find of the history of the Gods, that is chiefly in the old
writings, made a preface for the living legends of Finn. And although I
worked again in the British Museum and Irish Academy I found more
news of the Fianna nearer home.
I wrote again after a visit to a workhouse: . . . “an old man who came
to the door told me the story of Finn and Grania ‘and wasn’t it a queer
thing that she married him in the end? It was with enchantment he
coaxed her to marry him’.” Again, “A blind piper told me, ‘Some say
Grania was handsome, and some say she was ugly, there’s a saying in
the Irish for that’. But the old basket-maker was scornful and said,
‘Many would tell you Grania slept under the cromlechs, but I don’t
believe that, and she a king’s daughter. And I don’t believe she was
handsome either. If she was, why would she have run away?’ At
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Moycullen I was told: ‘As they were passing a stream the water
splashed Grania and she said, ‘Diarmuid never came so near to me as
that’.” I heard many stories of Oisin also, of his journey to Tir nan Og
and his arguments with Patrick and his conversion. (Gregory, Seventy
Years 405)
While she studied written text for Gods and Fighting Men, it is dissimilar from
Cuchulain as it boasts more inclusions from oral tradition. Her conversations “nearer
home” in Galway with the lower classes may have yielded the same basic information
found in manuscript text, but the phrases “and she a king’s daughter” and “Diarmuid
never came so near to me as that” evince that the tales, told orally, had retained the
colloquial eloquence of the common cadence. This was the popular appeal of the
peasant speech. In the sentence “Grania slept under the cromlechs” and in the blind
piper telling Lady Gregory of the “saying in the Irish for that” the tendency of the
native classes to retain certain Gaelic words and ideas in speech and thought is also
evident.
In Reliques there is no record of Charlotte Brooke having any conversations
with the local peasantry or the lower-classes. The closest her work comes to doing so
is with the original transcription of one “Elegy,” so titled, of which she says:
THE original of the following pathetic little elegy, was taken down
from the dictation of a young woman, in the county of Mayo, by Mr.
O’Flanagan, who was struck with the tender and beautiful simplicity
which it breathes. No account can be obtained, either of the writer, or
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of the period in which it was written. (Brooke 199, emphasis in
original)
Again, Brooke omits the name of this young woman and any information about the
date Mr. O’Flanagan recorded her dictation. Seymour claims, in his 1816 biography
of Brooke, that before she began Reliques, she did, in fact, have many similar poems
that she had collected on her own. But eventually, he says, (and this is akin to Lady
Gregory’s experience) the local people became aware of the work she was doing and
offered her many other compositions for her collection:
For some years previous to the publication of the “Reliques of Irish
poetry,” Miss Brooke had began to collect all the poems that were
written in the Irish language, having been often charmed to find many
beauties in the songs, even of the unlettered bards, in that tongue. At
first she only intended to collect a little nosegay of these poetical
flowers. The peasants were so pleased with this intelligence, that they
waited on her with all the scattered verses that memory could collect.
These grateful offerings made so deep an impression in her breast, that
she treasured them up, and resolved to translate them into English, if
her health would permit. . . .
In the course of a few years Miss Brooke found herself in possession
of a considerable number of fragments. . . .
These she published in a quarto volume, with notes, and the originals
in the Irish character. (Seymour xlv-xlvi)
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Although this description is written just after Seymour’s account of the history of
Brooke’s writing Reliques, and several period reviews of that book, it is uncertain if
he means to imply Reliques is this same “quarto volume.” Saying Brooke began it
“some years previous to the publication of Reliques” would indicate that it is a
separate, individual book; but Seymour does not record a publishing date or
publication information for another volume. If this volume were found, and was
indeed an earlier publication of such a collection of translated poetry and song, it
would be enormously useful to the study and understanding of Brooke’s life and her
writing career. From Seymour’s description, such a book would be strikingly unique
in its time, and very similar to Lady Gregory’s work. But it is a confused anecdote,
and no mention of this volume is found either in Ashley’s introduction or in modern
biographic information on Brooke.
Brooke also chose to translate her “original” Gaelic texts non-literally,
working most of her translations into four-lined stanzas with A-B-A-B or A-A-B-B
rhyme-schemes, producing verses which, read or spoken, imitate the traditional meter
of the ballad. She also uses anachronistic poetic phrases and spellings, such as
consistently abbreviating the suffix “-ed” as “-‘d.” In Reliques’ “Preface” Brooke
justifies her choices, saying, “I do not profess to give a merely literal version of my
originals, for that I should have found an impossible undertaking” (v). She goes on to
say:
I endeavour to rescue from oblivion a few of the invaluable reliques of
[Ireland’s] ancient genius; and while I put it in the power of the public
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to form some idea of them, by clothing the thoughts of our Irish muse
in a language with which they are familiar, at the same time that I give
the originals, as vouchers for the fidelity of my translation, as far as
two idioms so widely different would allow. (vii)
Literary writing similar to the style Brooke chose was not yet out of fashion, and so
she purposely “clothes” her translations in it. She uses the differences in the English
and Gaelic idioms to explain her choices, but her statement “a merely literal version
of my originals . . . I should have found an impossible undertaking” is untrue. She
was capable of making literal, un-stylized translations from Gaelic, as she does so
several times in Reliques; however, these literal translations are relegated to textual
footnotes. The popular stylized verses Brooke translates her texts into would appeal
to a wider audience, and including literal translations of some of her texts also serves
as a “voucher for her fidelity” as a translator.
The numerous, varied sources Lady Gregory translated from make an
identical recreation or representation of any one story impossible. She was well aware
of this problem, and of Cuchulain of Muirthemne’s context she says this, in the
book’s “Dedication . . . to the People of Kiltartan”:
When I went looking for the stories in the old writings, I found that the
Irish in them is too hard for any person to read that has not made a
long study of it. Some scholars have worked well at them, Irishmen
and Germans and Frenchmen, but they have printed them in the old
cramped Irish, with translations into German or French or English, and
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these are not easy for you to get, or to understand, and the stories
themselves are confused, every one giving a different account from the
others in some small thing, the way there is not much pleasure in
reading them. It is what I have tried to do, to take the best of the
stories, or whatever parts of each will fit best to one another, and in
that way to give a fair account of Cuchulain’s life and death. I left out
a good deal I thought you would not care about for one reason or
another, but I put in nothing of my own that could be helped, only a
sentence or so now and again to link the different parts together. I have
told the whole story in plain and simple words. (Cuchulain 5)
Like Brooke, Lady Gregory chose a stylized language for Cuchulain of Muirthemne,
to appeal to her real audience; the occasional Kiltartan idiom that colors Cuchulain
appealed to the Revivalists’ idea of a romantic traditional Ireland, and the textual
information was of interest to Irish-scholars. This piecing together of sources–adding
pieces of her own writing, keeping what she feels are the “best parts” which will “fit
best to one another”–makes it difficult to tell where one ends and another begins, and
what parts were and were not her own. The Kiltartan idiom would have helped
Cuchulain read uniformly, but it was not until she began playwriting that she used the
so-called peasant speech throughout her work; the dialogue of many of her plays is
written in Kiltartan. In Cuchulain studied translations and colloquialisms are equally
utilized. A synthesis was more convenient for a book concerned with fitting together
Neer 47
a variety of key elements, written after the scholarly works of fellow Irish writers and
the work done by Windisch, Zimmer, and De Jubainville.
Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques and the writing of other antiquarians set the
groundwork, in many ways, for the Revival that was to come. Antiquarian literature
and scholarship kept traditional mythology in circulation and created a library of
source material for future historians, scholars, and writers. Lady Gregory’s
knowledge of Reliques exemplifies the bridge between antiquarian and Revivalist
literature and illustrates the importance of the eighteenth century movement for that
of the nineteenth. Both Brooke’s and Lady Gregory’s dependence on manuscripts
also underscores the key role the Gaelic language played in literary nationalism. The
loss of the language would have meant the loss of the imagery, history, and
traditionalism which gave antiquarian nationalism and the Literary Revival its
vitality.
Charlotte Brooke’s “Maon: An Irish Tale”
Brooke’s “Maon: An Irish Tale” is a characteristic example of the antiquarian
nationalist and bardic literature Katie Trumpener analyzes in Bardic Nationalism, The
Romantic Novel and the British Empire, literature popularized and propagated in the
eighteenth century by Irish, Scottish, and Welsh antiquarian scholars. Brooke has
borrowed “Maon’s” events and characters from antiquity and styled the theme of her
writing after traditional bardic oral-literature; the “Tale” recounts an episode from
Ireland’s past, heroizes the protagonist Maon, and extols national strength, virtue, and
Neer 48
pride. As Trumpener points out, this nationalist idealization both typifies antiquarian
tropes and presents problematic ideology.
“Maon” is told in the first person and Brooke chooses the aged bard Craftine
as its narrator. He begins by recounting the murder of Ollioll Aine, Maon’s father,
and Laoghaire Lork, Maon’s grandfather and king, by Laoghaire’s brother Cobthach
who is intent on seizing on the throne.8 Craftine is able to escape with the infant
Maon and they flee to “Munster’s King” (336; line 104) where Maon is raised as a
prince but the truth of his lineage is kept from him. Over time, he and the king’s
daughter Moriat fall in love, but when Craftine learns that Cobthach has become
aware of Maon’s survival and intends to murder him, he reveals Cobthach’s past
treachery to the young man, but not his relationship to Ollioll and Laoghaire. Maon
swears revenge and he and Craftine determine to seek the foreign military aid of
Gallia.9 Before he goes, Maon also begs Craftine to stay with Moriat, which the bard
reluctantly agrees to do.
“The prince of Gallia’s fertile land, / To Erin’s throne ally’d” (344; lines 28990): Maon, through his extraordinary skills in battle, is eventually rewarded “sole
command / of Gallia’s armies” (344; lines 297-98) and news of his valor periodically
reaches Moriat in Ireland. She becomes troubled when, grown in strength and leading
Gallia’s military, he does not immediately return to avenge his countrymen.
Distressed, Craftine tells her of the news that “‘The daughter of the Gallic throne / Is
destin’d for his bride’” (345; lines 319-20). But Moriat, ever faithful, quickly deduces
that Maon is stalling; to ensure a secure alliance between the Gallic and Irish nations
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he would have to relinquish Moriat and marry Gallia’s princess, which he is loath to
do. Moriat is the first to realize that Maon’s torn loyalty is the reason for his delay,
and surprisingly, it is she who proclaims that national love, honor, and pride are more
important than romantic love. Brooke’s heroine supplants her affection for Maon with
love for the nation: “‘And Erin shall the room supply / Of Maon and of love’“ (348;
lines 399-400). Moriat is willing to relinquish Maon, “relying” instead “on duty”
(348; lines 397-98)–the duty to her country over her emotional commitment to him.
She succeeds in this duty by sending Craftine off to Gallia with a message for
Maon via a bardic song, hoping to inspire his course of action. The song will finally
reveal to Maon his birthright, as well as extol the virtues of both the Gallic princess
and a union between the two. After landing in Gallia, Craftine enters the royal court
and conceals his identity, waiting until the feast has ended in the evening to begin his
song. Like Moriat discovering the real reason behind Maon’s hesitation, Aide, the
Gallic princess, is the first to speak when the song has ended. She admits she had
loved Maon but knowing he loved another she would never harbor “the ungenerous
thought / That might their loves destroy” (356; lines 572-73). In the confusion that
follows, Craftine unfolds the tale of his charge to Maon, with a gracious heart Aide
asks her father to grant Maon the use of the military in avenging his forefathers,
which the Gallic king does, and the elated prince returns to Ireland and succeeds in
ousting Cobthach from the Irish throne. Thereupon he is reunited with Moriat and the
two marry, becoming king and queen of Ireland.
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Although Brooke has written a creative account of the life and role of the bard
Craftine, her characterization of him exemplifies the antiquarian interest in bards and
bardic literature discussed by Trumpener:
For nationalist antiquaries, the bard is the mouthpiece for a whole
society, articulating its values, chronicling its history, and mourning
the inconsolable tragedy of its collapse. . . . Nationalist antiquaries
read bardic poetry for its content and its historical information; their
analyses help to crystallize a new nationalist model of literary history.
. . . The late-eighteenth-century bardic revival gives new emphasis to
the social rootedness and political function of literature, as to the
inseparability of literary performance from specific institutions and
audiences. (6)
Craftine and Moriat, both functioning as bards in the poem, illustrate the antiquarian
belief in the bard as “the mouthpiece for a whole society.” Through a traditional
cultural practice Brooke’s Moriat transmits the societal values of the time; demanding
Maon’s loyalty to his country, exonerating duty, celebrating valor and bravery–this
educates audiences within and outside of the poem. Craftine, as a trained and
employed bard, is an inherent part of the “social rootedness and political function” of
the bardic order. Brooke’s idealization of bards and bardic culture is obvious: Maon,
inspired by Craftine’s performance, is able to avenge his kin, free the country from
the tyrannical rule of the usurper, win back the throne, and consequently remain
joyfully with Moriat in Ireland. The hero makes the choices valued by, according to
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antiquarians, bardic and ancient societies. In a society where heroic choices are made
and supported by idealized national representatives, a resolution which benefits
everyone is natural and easy.
Trumpener recognizes that these attitudes and beliefs are problematic. She
observes:
The reconstruction of Ireland is similarly slowed by the antiquarian
mode of reading the present-day landscape as overlaid with invisible
layers of tradition, and by the glossing of every discussion of current
problems with references to a glorious national past. Antiquarian
traditionalism weighs down Irish consciousness with a spurious
ancestor worship and an impossibly idealized sense of the old Ireland.
(60)
As representatives of an ancient political and social construct Maon and Cobthach are
part of the “overlaid” “invisible layers of tradition,” but readers are never given
extensive characterization or the motivations of the antagonist Cobthach. He and
Maon both exist in the folkloric realm where one man is simply good and other, bad.
This naively simplistic model of society ignores the complicated issues and conflict
within politics and culture in Ireland’s past, making the “glossing” over of “current
problems” that much easier. England is often made out to be, like Cobthach, an
usurper robbing Ireland of its natural rights. The only conceivable “good,” then, is a
return to the ordered society of the ancient past. Irish antiquarians realize this return is
impossible in reality, so they attempt or accomplish it in their literature.
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Reliques exemplifies both the positive and negative attributes of these
perpetuated antiquarian messages. Brooke helps to preserve literary traditions by
making the context of her sources accessible through translation and by including
those texts in their original language, and her writing sustains the memory and history
of an oral tradition by exemplifying the bardic order. But, she does not offer an
analysis of current national problems or suggest effective solutions to them. Brooke,
like other antiquarians, explicates what she feels are ancient Irish values, but
antiquarianism does not, cannot reconstruct a bardic order in the midst of eighteenthcentury Ireland, or construct a new order as teacher or guide.
Charlotte Brooke: Self-Presentation in the “Introduction” to “Maon: An Irish Tale”
Throughout Reliques of Irish Poetry, Brooke consciously adopts the image of
the dutiful woman and the shy supplicant. In the book’s “Preface,” for example, she
professes the concern that she should return “back to the shade whence I have been
allured, and where, perhaps, I ought to have remained, in respect to the memory, and
superior genius of a Father” (viii); here, she is portraying herself as passive and
unequal to Henry Brooke’s talents. She repeats this sentiment later about the men she
has copied her “originals” from, by vigorously claiming to be indebted to them and
by quoting lengthy passages of their historical writing instead of relying on her own
research. The “Introduction” to her poem “Maon: An Irish Tale” is a short fictitious
account of the experiences which prompted her to write “Maon.” In the
“Introduction,” Brooke submissively excuses her writing by claiming she wrote and
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published the tale under the pressure of the imaginary figures of her “Muse” and the
phantasmic ancient bard Craftine; however, she goes on to testify to the quality and
importance of her writing through Craftine, praising her work using his voice in place
of her own. Brooke contradicts the posed, self-depreciating language of the
“Introduction” when she describes Craftine’s indignation at her own humility and
“he” praises the “Muse’s” attention to the writing–and in Brooke’s case, patriotic
writing–of women. Craftine’s appearance and his actions are meant to validate what
Brooke has written; not only is he a specific character out of Irish lore, but also an
ancient figure backed by historic testimony and imagery. Craftine is a literary mask
behind which Brooke is protected while she defends her antiquarian scholarship and
nationalist writing.
“Maon’s” “Introduction” begins by addressing Mr. and Mrs. Trant, the couple
to whom “Maon” is dedicated, saying, “And take from me, in artless phrase, / The
message of the Muse” (Brooke 325; lines 3-4). Immediately Brooke establishes
distance between herself and her writing. She has not written “Maon” or its
“Introduction” independently; instead she is merely an “artless” (honest) messenger.
This is the same muse, Brooke says:
Who train’d, of old, our sires to fame,
And led them to the field;
Taught them to glow with Freedom’s flame,
And Freedom’s arms to wield. (325; lines 13-16)
Neer 54
Evoking the memory of Ireland’s forefathers, as well as proclaiming ancestral
freedom and valor, is eighteenth-century antiquarian nationalist rhetoric. Brooke
quickly follows these statements with an account of her meeting the important figure
who continually and ardently defends this ancient muse:
This power, while late my couch I press’d,
To mental sight appear’d;
To my charm’d soul sweet words address’d,
By waking Fancy heard.
Shrin’d in the form of reverend age,
The friendly vision came;
Rob’d as of old, a Bardic Sage,
And took Craftine’s name. (326; lines 25-32)
Brooke’s depiction of a conversation with a bard from antiquity utilizes popular
antiquarian themes in a new way. Instead of merely writing about this figure, readers
actually “meet” Craftine, who goes on to narrate “Maon.” This personal relationship
Brooke claims with antiquity is the unique way in which she authorizes her writing.
Brooke then begins to describe how Craftine, whom she initially calls
“friendly,” takes her “‘timid mind’” (326; line 33), her apparently delayed
publication, and her fear of criticism to task. Because she has been set before the
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“‘splendid path, / Fame and the Muse adorn’” (326; lines 39-40) he dismisses her
hesitation. Of female writing he reassures and reminds her:
“For oft the Muse, a gentle guest,
Dwells in a female form;
And patriot fire, a female breast,
May sure unquestion’d warm.” (327; lines 49-52)
And two stanzas after:
“Thee hath the sweet enchantress taught,
The accents of her tongue;
Pour’d on thine ear her lofty thought,
Celestial as she sung.” (327; lines 57-60)
At this point, Brooke changes her self-depiction as a shy, passive woman, to that of a
legitimized patriotic female writer. Now, the Muse has not only offered Brooke
inspiration, but she has also elevated “Maon”; the poem is “lofty,” “Celestial”–
almost divine. Writing within a genre dominated by men, Brooke is using the image
of a muse who favors women to defend her place among male scholars. Her language
and her attitude are enormous contrasts to her earlier confessions of inferiority, but
Brooke, aware that her own praise of female writers and writing may appear too bold
to an eighteenth-century audience, instead uses the narrative persona of Craftine to
express these views. Even though this turn in her writing would have been obvious to
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her readers, it is also more conventional than a blatant, first-person nationalist
proclamation from Brooke.
About the Muse, Craftine continues:
“Now let her see thy grateful heart
With fond ambition burn,
Proud if thou can’st, at least in part,
Her benefits return.
Long, her neglected harp unstrung,
With glooms encircl’d round;
Long o’er its silent form she hung
Nor gave her soul to sound.” (327-328; lines 61-68)
The image of the “neglected” harp is a common image in nationalist bardic literature;
Brooke portrays the once gentle Craftine as angrily, viciously roused by the memory
of a destroyed bardic past. In the passage, he chastises Brooke herself, calling her an
undeserving coward because she is shrinking away from the “‘bright path’” of a
writer and the “‘bright prize’” of poetry this muse is willingly offering her (328; lines
77-79). By constructing Craftine as disgusted with her timidity, Brooke is again
indirectly emphasizing the importance of the message she conveys through “Maon”;
through Craftine’s impatient attitude, Brooke implicates the necessity of publishing
the “Tale.” By lifting her own “soul to sound,” Brooke also becomes a bard herself,
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she makes hers a bardic role. Claiming contact with Craftine is a bold statement, since
he represents a direct link to Ireland’s past. Brooke is suggesting that she is
sanctioned by a personification of antiquity.
The struggle with Craftine Brooke describes reveals and accomplishes several
things. Brooke does not expect that her readers will accept her work as having
literally resulted from supernatural intervention–this is a literary convention–but her
continued insistence that she is inspired or pressed upon by others is meant to relieve
her of some of the responsibility for her writing. Rather than summoning Craftine, he
has come to her unbidden; this casts Brooke in the role of passive observer and holds
her accountable for the bard. Brooke almost makes herself out to be a victim; Craftine
is bullying her into publishing the tale against her will. Her determination to paint
herself as imposed upon safely distances Brooke from the political implications of her
writing, and is an appeal to her audience to excuse this writing should they feel it is
mediocre. This posturing also allows Brooke to speak through Craftine; utilizing the
conventional images of a generous muse and a worldly bard, Craftine enables Brooke
to voice her unconventional opinions.
Lady Gregory: Revivalist Literature and Self-Presentation
Just as Brooke’s Reliques typified the interests of eighteenth century
antiquarian nationalists, Lady Gregory wrote many books that were typical of the
literary interests of the nineteenth century Revivalist writers. Lady Gregory’s works
interested in folk traditionalism include Poets and Dreamers (1903) and her series of
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“Kiltartan” books: The Kiltartan History Book (1909), The Kiltartan Wonder Book
(1910), and The Kiltartan Poetry Book (1918). Often Lady Gregory wrote these
books aided by oral sources, such as the stories and memories recounted by native
Galway men and women, and in 1920 Lady Gregory published her last book of Irish
tradition and superstition–Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. The book is a
very large collection of these conversations in that it represents twenty-seven years of
Lady Gregory interviewing, recording, and exploring folk- beliefs and traditions in
County Galway.
Visions and Beliefs does not include any of Lady Gregory’s original writing;
except for chapter or section introductions she does not interject with comments or
commentary of her own. Instead, the book is composed of the literal transcriptions of
conversations Lady Gregory had had with Galway men and women, and she
consciously preserved the distinctive idiom of their dialogue, Kiltartan. The “visions
and beliefs” of the people are real experiences they claim to have had with
supernatural forces or other-worldly creatures, “mythological” creatures, like seapeople, changelings, faery-folk. The information that has been presented by these
people contains some of the most iconic images of Ireland, many of which are still
present in twenty-first-century national folklore–the people of the Sidhe whom some
call faeries; the stealing “away” of young women and children; figures like old wise
women, healers, and banshees; supernaturally-charged places like wells and forths.
At first glance, this description of Visions and Beliefs makes Lady Gregory
and her writing appear as champions of the common Irish people and devoted to Irish
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national interests. But she was an Irish Protestant and a member of an elite class of
people whose roots belonged more to English than to Ireland. The latter half of her
life is as much marked by literary self-styling as it was by a sincere wish to reclaim
her Irish heritage. Her dealings with the poorer classes surrounding both Coole and
Roxborough are admirable and serve as a fine example of how a landlord may
honorably deal with his or her tenants, but theirs was still, even in her mind, a kind of
business relationship, and not a personal one. In the years after her husband’s death,
she made it her business to collect among these, her poor tenants and countrymen,
their stories, superstitions, and traditions for her own uses. Although Lady Gregory
often portrays herself in her writing as a friend of these people, her self-portrait is,
like Brooke’s, constructed for specific audiences.
Colm Toibin asserts, in Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, that Lady Gregory’s
“transformation was slow” from Unionist to Republican and that “slowly she began to
love Ireland” (33). In spite of this, in the same year she began working on Cuchulain
of Muirthemne, Lady Gregory wrote, in the introductory note for her translation of “A
Sorrowful Lament for Ireland,” political rhetoric with Unionist undertones. The
introductory note and the translated “Lament” were published by the Irish periodical
The Leader, in 1900. In this introduction, Lady Gregory writes:
I have translated [this poem] from the Irish for The Leader, because its
writer does not, as many Irish writers have done, attribute the many
griefs of Ireland only to the mounted hosts of the Gall, but also to the
faults and shortcomings to which the people of a country broken up by
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conquest are more liable than the people of a country that has kept its
own settled rule. It has been said of Ireland in the last century, “Well
might Irishmen demand reform. Never did system saturated with
corruption need it more. But it did not occur to them that if reform was
to be effected, each one of them must begin with a reform of his own
heart.” The Leader is calling us to listen to the same lesson to-day. Mr.
Standish O’Grady has written of its editor–“He at least sees and knows
that the enemy is not across the water, but here in our own hearts and
souls, and the accumulated power of bad habits and traditions and
cants and shams past counting.” (Poets and Dreamers 271)
Lady Gregory’s concern that “many Irish writers” have “attributed the country’s
griefs only” to invasion and occupation may be a response to attitudes within
antiquarian writing, and the “bad habits and traditions and cants and shams past
counting,” the messages of antiquarians and radicals who extolled an idealized preconquest past, blamed internal national strife on occupiers, and then perpetuated these
beliefs. Her criticism of an ideology that assigns blame easily without offering viable
solutions is justifiable.
However, these are also rather hypocritical words; in 1900 Lady Gregory
began working on her first book of collected and translated Irish folklore, Cuchulain
of Muirthemne, and only two years later published in it a “Dedication Of The Irish
Edition To The People Of Kiltartan” (5-6) in which she rejects pretentious scholarly
writing and styles her own work as belonging to the people–the same classes of
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people in which the propagation and retention of the “traditions and cants” O’Grady
criticizes had the most appeal.
The “Lament’s” introductory note is evidence of Lady Gregory’s Anglican
views, and ignores the role her class has played in “breaking up the country.” Here,
she sits atop a perch of Christian morality, sermonizing her values and scolding. But
like her O’Grady cousins she was studying ancient Irish history and mythology. 10
These dichotomies within her writing were not malicious nor meant to deceive, but
rather, like several of her peers, were consequences of living in two so-called
different worlds. Although she was inspired by the people outside of her social class,
she enjoyed her social position and remained conscious of it and of her audiences
when she was writing, whether those audiences were real or projected.
By 1920 and the publication of Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland,
Lady Gregory’s political views had become predominantly Republican. Although she
never relinquished Coole, eventually she was forced to sell the property to the
Forestry Department of the Irish Land Commission (Coxhead 211), and she rented it
back from them. These events, however, had little obvious impact on her folklorecollecting or folkloric writing, or on her interactions with the local native people. She
continued to converse with them and Visions and Beliefs evinces Lady Gregory’s
consistent self-presentation as a friend of the common men and women and as a
gracious recipient of their folk belief and thought.
There are several significant men and women Lady Gregory speaks to or of in
Visions and Beliefs’s chapter “Seers and Healers,” but the most important, and for
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whom she writes the chapter introduction, is a woman called Biddy Early. Although
she had passed away long before 1920, in Visions and Beliefs Biddy Early becomes a
tangible, living representative of an idea of old Ireland that was popular in the early
years of the Revival. Revivalists would see her folk-wisdom not as part of the lost
traditions of the ancient or historic Irish monarchy, but as tied to native-Irish
experience. Like her “Dedication” in Cuchulain, Lady Gregory’s extensive writing on
Biddy Early is another way she proves and exhibits her connection with the people.
Biddy Early was well known in Galway among the lower and peasant classes. A poor
woman herself, she made her name by the multitude of cures she gave and through
the widely accepted belief that she talked regularly with the Sidhe. She became a
folkloric character in the minds of the local people even in her lifetime and did
nothing to refute that reputation; her comments were clairvoyant and she spoke
casually of the Sidhe as if her relationship with them was natural and ordinary. These
are only a couple of the many remembrances of Biddy Early Lady Gregory recorded,
but each one illustrates the power Biddy Early was believed to have had, and how that
power was, in turn, believed to be the result of her fraternization with supernatural
forces. Mrs. Cregan mentions Early’s famous bottle, and recalls that the healer had
mentioned the Sidhe:
Mrs. Cregan:
It’s I was with this woman here to Biddy Early. And when she saw me,
she knew it was for my husband I came, and she looked in her bottle
and she said, “It’s nothing put upon him by my people that’s wrong
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with him.” And she bid me give him cold oranges and some other
things–herbs. He got better after. (Visions and Beliefs 33)
The bottle Mrs. Cregan is speaking of is an actual bottle which Early famously used
as a kind of crystal ball; she would shake it and look into it and what she saw served
to clarify problems, answer questions, or foretell events. Many believed this bottle
was, like her second-sight and her healing abilities, given to her by “her people,” i.e.,
the Sidhe.
Another local Lady Gregory spoke with named Daniel Curtain told her, “Did I
ever hear of Biddy Early? There’s not a man in this countryside over forty year old
that hasn’t been with her some time or other” (Visions and Beliefs 33). His comment
is evidence of how widespread Biddy Early’s influence was and what an important
part she played in the local social landscape. Several of the people Lady Gregory
spoke to admitted they had been too scared to use the cures Biddy Early had given
them, but had kept them nonetheless, exposing their superstitious belief about Early
herself. The idea of her power was fixed in the minds of many of the people but no
one (except the occasional clergyman) presumed to question her.
Her interest in and consideration for Biddy Early increased her popularity
with the local people; she was as fascinated by her as they were and the more she
asked in earnest, the more information people were willing to give. Lady Gregory
says, when she returned one evening from her travels to seek out Biddy Early’s old
home, that she “found many of the neighbors gathered there, wanting to hear news of
‘the Tulla Woman’ ” (Visions and Beliefs 32). One woman Lady Gregory questioned
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asked her, “Tell me now is there anything wrong about you or your son that you went
to that house?” (Visions and Beliefs 38) presuming Lady Gregory was looking for her
own cure or answer. Here Lady Gregory, too, has “been with” Biddy Early, in a
manner of speaking, “some time or other,” and questions like this evince her slow
adoption and acceptance by these local people she was conversing with. Her choice to
compose Visions and Beliefs in the Kiltartan dialogue, rather than the formal,
“educated” speech of the upper and/or literary classes, also displays an increasingly
comfortable familiarity with and understanding of the lower-classes.
Critical Examinations of Biography and Literary Criticism
As Robert Hogan discusses in the Dictionary of Irish Literature, Charlotte
Brooke is one of the “cultured men and women” in the eighteenth century who
“began to study Irish literature and Irish music” and of whom “it may be said that the
modern Irish revival can be traced to” (59). In spite of her important role as an
antiquarian scholar and writer, she earns a mere nod in books about the political,
antiquarian, and literary movements of her time, or in Irish dictionaries. While
scholars recognize Brooke’s writing as having contributed to the eighteenth century
antiquarian movement in Irish nationalist literature, contemporary literary criticism of
her work is non-existent. Information about her is limited to biography–biography
which has relied heavily on Aaron Crossley Seymour’s Memoirs of Miss Brooke
(1816), appended to the 1970 facsimile reproduction of her Reliques. His is the
earliest formal biography of Brooke and it is easy to discern where authors have
Neer 65
referenced him, since the limited information he provides has been thoroughly
recycled, as it is, for example, in Alspach’s chapter on Brooke in Irish Poetry.
Literary criticism on Lady Gregory’s writing, particularly her non-dramatic
works, is minimal. Where the Irish Theatre is not concerned, Lady Gregory: A
Literary Portrait (1961) by Elizabeth Coxhead, unfortunately remains the definitive
work on this woman, her life, and her career. Most commonly, critics, such as Hazard
Adams in Lady Gregory, focus on her role in the birth of The Abbey Theatre and her
subsequent plays, and her relationship with William Butler Yeats. Critically, Lady
Gregory’s many books of collected and translated folklore, and explorations of
traditional culture, are passed over quickly or ignored.
By default, Seymour’s biography has earned the reputation of providing a
wealth of information about Brooke. His writing is extremely conventional, and as a
work of objective, historical biography it offers modern critics and historians very
little substantial information. The title claims “Miss Brooke” is the biographical
subject, but Memoirs is padded with extensive genealogies of her extended family
and information about her father. It concludes with descriptions of her religious
sentiments rather than her literary ones, in the form of long, proselytizing letters she
wrote to friends and relatives. Seymour fails to include any letters or passages of her
personal writing that relate to her professional work, and he barely discusses
Reliques.
What he does write about Brooke is discouraging. He obsessively extols her
virtues in romanticized language and through idealized characterization:
Neer 66
Music, drawing, and painting in water-colours, engaged her attention.
She spent much time in reading; at once gratifying her thirst after
knowledge, and acquiring important and useful information. By this
means she extended her knowledge of the world, and acquired that
variety and depth of erudition, which justly rendered her an object of
admiration to all who knew her . . . She was admired for her personal
charms; and she possessed all the graces of the most polished manners,
and the most engaging address. (Seymour xxi)
To modern readers this description of Brooke presents her like a heroine from a
novel, and no doubt it was meant to serve a similar purpose. Seymour is establishing
Brooke as a socially and intellectually well-educated young woman, fully adept in the
pursuits and occupations gentlewomen of the time were expected to have. His only
nod to her literary ambitions is his mention of her love of reading and “her thirst after
knowledge.”
Another sample of his descriptions of Brooke emphasizes her introduction to
Irish literature:
She was not a person to whom mediocrity, in any sense, could be
attributed. Promptitude, vigour, and resolution, marked her entire
character . . . She . . . was an enthusiastic admirer of the sublime and
beautiful. She valued erudition in all its branches . . . and strove
patiently and laboriously to gain an extensive knowledge of literature .
. . Her acquaintance with general science, though not profound, was
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extensive. She knew no luxury so great as a book: her reading was
constant and diversified . . . She was mistress of Italian and French . . .
. To the study of the Irish she was enthusiastically attached. (Seymour
lxxviii-lxxx)
Her “admiration of the sublime and beautiful” and her “extensive knowledge of
literature” are qualifiers, in Seymour’s mind, for the undertaking of Reliques. Today,
the existence of Reliques would be testament alone to her intelligence and what he
calls her “promptitude, vigour, and resolution,” but nineteenth century biography
belabors these points to readers. The discussion of Brooke’s literary interests, her
fluency in foreign languages, and especially her “enthusiastic attachment” to the Irish
language form a kind of resume for her, since her writing represents a study of
antiquarian sources and Gaelic manuscripts. The existence of Reliques affirms
Brooke’s intelligence and her understanding of the Irish language, and in overidealizing her Seymour accomplishes the antithesis of his aim, and strips her of her
credentials and believability. Seymour may have done this consciously, but it raises
many questions, such as, if such a woman existed, how did she avoid celebrity and
greater popularity, in her time and in ours? Why didn’t she continue to write? Why is
Reliques of Irish Poetry her only major work?
Unlike Lady Gregory, very, very little of Brooke’s personal writing has
survived, such as letters or journals, or, if it has, it is inaccessible to the average
researcher. Seymour, claiming to have several of her letters in his possession, says of
his selective publication of them, “With regard to the letters omitted, I would observe
Neer 68
that on the one hand, there was nothing in them that could have detracted from the
substantial excellency of Miss Brooke: or on the other, that could have been
important to her character, either in rendering it useful and impressive, or prominent
and distinct” (cxxi). This reflects the author’s personal judgment and not an objective
reason for omission. Of course, by omitting Brooke’s personal writing, Seymour
could have no idea how distinctly important her published writing would be two
hundred years later, or how useful her personal discourse would be to modern
scholars interested in her character or her career.
While limited biographical material about her may not clarify why Charlotte
Brooke is wholly neglected in critical writing, it does help to explain why she is
misrepresented in surveys of Irish literature. Similarly, a lack of scholarly interest in
her life has allowed erroneous information about her to circulate as fact. For example,
A Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography (1937) records that she is a:
poetess . . . one of the 22 children of Henry Brooke. (“She was the first
to appreciate and collect the scattered poems in the Irish language.
These she translated and published with the originals in Reliques of
Irish Poetry, in 1789. She certainly did an acceptable service to her
country.”–Webb.) Wrote a tragedy, “Belisarius,” her Bolg tSolair, a
Gaelic magazine published at Belfast, 1795. (Crone 19)
As discussed earlier, she was not the first among the Anglo-Irish “to appreciate and
collect the scattered poems in the Irish language” in the eighteenth century. The
Concise Dictionary’s entry is confused and unclear–it is an enigmatic claim that Bolg
Neer 69
tSolair belonged to Brooke. As Thuente points out, “Two years after her death, the
United Irishmen incorporated parts of her Reliques into their Gaelic magazine entitled
Bolg an tSolair” (87).11 The magazine belonged to them and not to her. More
accurate information about this publication and Brooke’s posthumous inclusion in it
can be reasonably expected from a twentieth-century dictionary dedicated to Irish
biographies. Brooke’s list of subscribers in Reliques includes several members of the
United Irishmen, but the organization is never mentioned or alluded to in the book; it
is unknown how such a gross error has been made by the Dictionary.
More recently, The Encyclopedia of Ireland (2003) describes Brooke as a:
poet and translator. . . . Her interest in Irish was sparked when she
overheard a workman reading from a manuscript. Joseph Cooper
Walker fostered her interest in translation, which was further
encouraged by the Ossian controversy. Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789)
is a pioneering work, not least because of the bilingual text. She has
been judged harshly on her perceived inadequacies as a translator,
particularly of Irish metre, and the work itself has received little
critical attention, but lately her reputation as a poet has risen.
(Kilfeather 134)
Despite the assertion that “lately her reputation as a poet has risen,” what has been
written about her in recent years is minimal. Moreover, the assertion that a well
educated upper-class woman, whose own father enjoyed literary and critical success
in Ireland and abroad, during his lifetime, was arbitrarily inspired by “overhearing a
Neer 70
workman read from a manuscript” is nonsensical. Thuente, who devotes considerable
attention to Walker and Brooke in The Harp Re-strung, states that, “Walker’s note
about Brooke and her translations in his collection [Historical Memoirs of the Irish
Bards] praised her contact with the living tradition of Irish poetry on her father’s
estate, where she had heard poems recited in Irish in the fields and had seen
manuscript versions as well” (82). His comment does not imply that this “contact”
was the impetus for her writing and he does not define it, unless readers are to
understand that it was simply hearing “recited poems.” Nor does it clarify whether
said manuscripts belonged to those fieldhands or to her father. But this account of
Walker’s is most likely responsible for the development the Encyclopedia’s story.
Seymour would have us believe Brooke became aware of Irish antiquities, and
learned the Gaelic language, in this way:
Miss Brooke’s passion for literature and general information daily
increased, and frequently after the family had retired to rest, she would
leave her bed, dress herself, and steal down to the study to read. . . .
The study of antiquities . . . was that for which she conceived a
passionate curiosity. It led her insensibly into the study of the Irish
language, to which she adhered so closely and so successfully, that
with little or no assistance, she, in less than two years, became perfect
mistress of it. (xxxii)
His account is rather romantic but not impossible, and is likely closer to the truth than
stories about her listening to the recitations of fieldhands. As the daughter of a
Neer 71
gentleman, who was himself a writer, Brooke was undoubtedly raised in a literary
household where books written in Irish very probably existed. Brooke’s discovery of
the Irish language was probably similar to that made by other Anglo-Irish
antiquarians; she had these books, and possibly manuscripts, at her disposal and she
studied them. Even Lady Gregory’s first attempt to learn Gaelic was self-directed, as
it was taboo for her to learn it as a child; as an adult she began to familiarize herself
with the language by comparing an English Bible to a Gaelic one. Brooke may have
become sensitive to the language of the oral traditions when she heard it as a
consequence of independent reading, but her gender and her separation from the
lower and agrarian classes would have made such an introduction to Gaelic as the
Encyclopedia claims unlikely and unrealistic.
Like Seymour’s portrait of Brooke, Elizabeth Coxhead’s Lady Gregory: A
Literary Portrait has been repeatedly referenced by scholars interested in Lady
Gregory’s life. Often anecdotal and conjectural, on one point alone Coxhead, whose
book was published in 1961, may be excused; Lady Gregory’s autobiography Seventy
Years, 1852-1922 was not published until 1974. However, the autobiographical Lady
Gregory’s Journals 1916-1930 was available in 1946. Coxhead claims to have used
Lady Gregory’s published works as autobiographical sources of information about
her life (vi), but she does not cite any of them. Had Seventy Years been available to
her, it may have influenced writing which, as it is, is sentimental and reductive. It is
hard to take Coxhead seriously, for example, when she presents such descriptions of
Lady Gregory as: “When Yeats came to Coole to begin his stay with her, they wrote
Neer 72
their letter of appeal [for The Abbey] on the typewriter, which was still a new toy”
(47), or “She served [Yeats and Synge] as a literary midwife and kitchenmaid” (133).
These comments are patronizing; they undervalue Lady Gregory’s collaboration with
other Revivalist writers, and are irrelevant to her literary career. Coxhead also claims
her book is not a work of biography, but most of her writing is biographical in nature
(vi). Contrary to its title, A Literary Portrait is not a work of literary criticism; it
touches on Lady Gregory’s early writing and her plays, but criticism of them is
limited, and of her creative writing and collected and translated folklore, it is
altogether non-existent.
A far more realistic look at Lady Gregory’s life is Colm Toibin’s Lady
Gregory’s Toothbrush. He does not do Lady Gregory the injustice of making her a
doting old woman clinging to the coattails of male literary genius. Nor is he
recreating Lady Gregory for history in the way Coxhead has, passing quietly over
inconvenient or uncomfortable truths about her politics or religious beliefs. His
research discloses that she had an affair with Wilfrid Blunt shortly after her marriage;
she could be a religious bigot (though carefully hidden); she vehemently despised the
Abbey’s original patron, Miss Horniman; and at 59 she had another clandestine tryst
with a man eighteen years her junior while on the Abbey’s American tour. These
fascinating anecdotes help to color her character and by publishing these facts the
reader is allowed a fuller picture of her life. While Toibin’s insights are attentiongrabbing, unfortunately his writing is focused on biography rather than literary
criticism and Toothbrush does not examine Lady Gregory’s writing. It is, instead,
Neer 73
valuable as a work of relatively objective (albeit very short) historical biography, and
it is clear that Toibin has done a good deal of research on Lady Gregory’s role in the
Irish Literary Revival.
The numerous inaccuracies perpetuated about both Charlotte Brooke and
Lady Gregory, in Irish literary history, mean there is much research that still needs to
be done about these women. Modern literary-critical approaches, such as feminist
analyses of authorship, or post-colonial studies of antiquarianism, would offer new,
fresh insights on Brooke and Lady Gregory’s motivations and the role their selfconstruction played in helping and hindering both the messages of their writing and
their careers. Feminist literary analysis coupled with a study of gender roles in
eighteenth and nineteenth century Irish society, and also in literary criticism, would
help to explain why Brooke was often “indebted” to other, male, antiquarians and
why she felt the need to stylize her authorship throughout Reliques, and why Lady
Gregory’s predominant value to scholars is based on her relationship to William
Butler Yeats.
Feminist critiques of Irish women have begun to look broadly at the Literary
Revival or at revolutionaries like Maud Gonne, but examinations of specific written
works are again often limited to playwriting, or to feminist or feminine literary
themes. Novelists like Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849), also working during the
Romantic period, are favored for their more overt political statements, while Brooke’s
antiquarian-inspired politics have been ignored. Lady Gregory’s plays are beginning
Neer 74
to receive some attention from feminist literary critics, but the playwright herself is
not.
With the exception of Seymour’s citations from The Critical Review in his
biography of Brooke, and of Herbert Howarth’s comments in The Irish Writers,
Literature and Nationalism, 1880-1940 on Lady Gregory’s use of the Kiltartan idiom,
linguist criticism has not been written about Reliques or about the so-called Galway
peasant speech recorded by Lady Gregory. Brooke and Reliques are unique in their
time and Lady Gregory’s Kiltartan is fascinating reading, but it is not enough to
blindly accept their scholarship without studying written, spoken, and translated
Gaelic alongside their texts. As discussed, Brooke was apparently capable of making
literal translations. A more thorough study of the language of her “originals” and the
translations she has made from them will enable scholars to assess her abilities and
discover just how familiar she was with the different period-specific variants of
written Gaelic. A study of her translations and the translations made by other
antiquarians can also be applied to writers who could not read Gaelic. Writing which
depended on peer translations was subject to limited information. The reliability of
that information–how much of it was subjective, lost, altered, or stylized as it was reinterpreted and re-circulated–was dependent on the accuracy of those few who were
translators. Although Howarth feels Lady Gregory has “purified” her written
Kiltartan (96), most of Lady Gregory’s contemporaries trusted the legitimacy of the
dialect. Because it has been over one hundred years since she was studying and
writing in the idiom, a visit to Galway today to hear it spoken first-hand may or may
Neer 75
not produce definite evidence of the cadence she had heard and published. A muchneeded study of the Kiltartan idiom can be approached linguistically, as well as
through the lens of literary criticism.
Studies of the Gaelic “originals” alone, which Brooke translated and included
in Reliques, might also be undertaken. Linguistic analysis would be able to determine
the age of the texts she reproduced, exposing the degree of accuracy of her dating.
Scholars have not determined which, if any, of Ireland’s extant manuscripts were her
“originals,” nor have they studied the manuscripts or the widely published
philological sources Lady Gregory utilized in writing Cuchulain. Philologic history,
especially the role Germany has played in this discipline, has been a popular field of
study for many years. Exploring how specific manuscripts ended up in the possession
of the lower and peasant classes or found their way into Anglo-Irish Big Houses may
offer insight to Ireland’s cultural history and the history of its demographic
movement. Clearly, an intimate biographic study of Brooke, and in-depth linguist and
historic studies of Reliques and of Lady Gregory’s mythological and folkloric works
remains to be done. A twenty-first century analysis, as well as the cross-disciplinary
implications of their writing and their writing careers, will make for fascinating
investigations.
Neer 76
Notes
1
England, destroying those of the “Anglo-Irish capitalists who were building
breweries, manufacturing silk, glass, and pottery, and establishing a linen and a cotton
industry” (Greene xxx) in Ireland.
2
Sir William Gregory was governor of Ceylon, modern-day Sri Lanka, from 1872
to 1877.
3
“An Craoibhin Aoibhin,” or “the Delightful Little Branch” (Gregory, Seventy
Years 382).
4
Coxhead describes his Love Songs of Connacht as “all traditional poems he had
collected, with translations. Some of these are in verse . . . but more important are the
literal prose translations. They are really intended as a sort of ‘crib’, to help the
student of Irish, and are frequently relegated to a footnote” (42).
5
Aoife was the mother of Cuchulain’s son Conloch. Lady Gregory would have
read, and is referencing here, Brooke’s “Conloch: A Poem” and “The Lamentation of
Cucullin, Over The Body Of His Son Conloch.”
6
Judging from Lady Gregory’s brief discussions of Gods and Fighting Men (1904)
in Seventy Years’s “The Epics” chapter, it seems to be a book very similar to
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Cuchulain of Muirthemne in research methodology, execution, and style. It recounts
the tales of Finn and the Fianna. Unfortunately I could not obtain a copy of it to study
myself.
7
“Finian” and “Fenian” are synonymous terms.
8
See Brooke’s extended information regarding this event (332, note b).
9
“Gallia” is probably meant to be synonymous with “Gaul,” the poetic name for
ancient France. Craftine observes that Maon’s parting from Moriat will be difficult,
but all their hopes lie in French aid. At the time Brooke was writing “Maon” Irish and
Anglo-Irish activists (like the United Irishmen) were also looking to France for
military aid against the English. Brooke’s awareness of this may have influenced or
inspired her protagonist’s perception of “Gallia” as a friendly ally.
10
Standish Hayes O’Grady and Standish James O’Grady were both cousins of
Lady Gregory and both men were doing scholarly and literary work for Ireland. I do
not know which O’Grady she is referring to in her introductory note.
11
The Dictionary has recorded its spelling as “Bolg tSolair” and Thuente, “Bolg an
tSolair.” Both are acceptable Gaelic spellings for the title of this magazine.
Neer 78
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Dublin, 1789. v-xv.
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Elegies, and Songs, Translated into English Verse: with Notes Explanatory and
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Tale. Dublin, 1789.
Canny, Nicholas. “Early Modern Ireland, c.1500-1700.” The Oxford Illustrated
History of Ireland. Ed. R.F. Foster. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 104-60.
Coxhead, Elizabeth. Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, Inc., 1961.
Crone, John S. A Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography. 1937. Nendeln: Kraus, 1970.
Figgis, Allen. “Language.” Encyclopedia of Ireland. Comp. Allen Figgis. Dublin:
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Greene, David H. An Anthology of Irish Literature. New York: The Modern Library,
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Gregory, Lady. Cuchulain of Muirthemne. 1902. 5th ed. Colin Smythe Ltd., the Coole
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Trumpener, Katie. Bardic Nationalism, The Romantic Novel and the British Empire.
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Ashley, Leonard R. N. Introduction. Reliques of Irish Poetry. By Charlotte Brooke.
Dublin, 1789. v-xv.
Brooke, Charlotte. Reliques of Irish Poetry: Consisting of Heroic Poems, Odes,
Elegies, and Songs, Translated into English Verse: with Notes Explanatory and
Historical, and the Originals in the Irish Character. To Which is Subjoined An Irish
Tale. Dublin, 1789.
Canny, Nicholas. “Early Modern Ireland, c.1500-1700.” The Oxford Illustrated
History of Ireland. Ed. R.F. Foster. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 104-60.
Coxhead, Elizabeth. Lady Gregory: A Literary Portrait. New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, Inc., 1961.
Crone, John S. A Concise Dictionary of Irish Biography. 1937. Nendeln: Kraus, 1970.
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Allen Figgis & Co. Limited; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968. 115-19.
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Figgis, Allen, comp. Encyclopedia of Ireland. Dublin: Allen Figgis & Co. Limited;
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.
Foster, R.F., ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
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Greene, David H. An Anthology of Irish Literature. New York: The Modern Library,
Random House, 1954.
Gregory, Lady. Cuchulain of Muirthemne. 1902. 5th ed. Colin Smythe Ltd., the Coole
Edition II. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1970.
--- . Gods and Fighting Men. 1904. The Coole Edition III. Gerrards Cross: Colin
Smythe, 1970.
--- . The Kiltartan Books; Comprising the Kiltartan Poetry, History and Wonder
Books. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
--- . The Kiltartan Poetry Book, Prose Translations From the Irish. 1918. Shannon:
Irish UP, 1971.
--- . Poets and Dreamers, Studies & Translations from the Irish. 1903. 5th ed. Colin
Smythe Ltd., the Coole Edition XI. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1974.
--- . Seventy Years, 1852-1922. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
Neer 84
--- . Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. 1920. 2nd ed. Colin Smythe Ltd., the
Coole Edition. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1970.
Hogan, Robert, ed. Dictionary of Irish Literature. Connecticut: Greenwood Press,
1979.
Howarth, Herbert. The Irish Writers, Literature and Nationalism, 1880-1940. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1958.
Hyde, Douglas. A Literary History of Ireland, From Earliest Times to the Present
Day. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.
--- . The Love Songs of Connacht, Being the Fourth Chapter of the Songs of
Connacht. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971.
Keating, Geoffrey, John O'Mahony, and Michael Doheny. Foras Feasa Ar Eirinn Do
Re´ir an Athar Seathrun Ce´iting, Ollamh Re´ Diadhachta. The History of Ireland,
from the Earliest Period to the English Invasion. New York: P.M. Haverty, 1857.
Kiberd, Declan. Inventing Ireland. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1995.
Kilfeather, Siobhan. “Brooke, Charlotte.” The Encyclopedia of Ireland. Ed. Brian
Lalor. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. 134.
Lalor, Brian, ed. The Encyclopedia of Ireland. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Macpherson, James. Fragments of Ancient Poetry: (1760). Publications / Augustan
reprint society, 122. 1966.
--- . The Poems of Ossian. Edinburgh: Grant, 1926.
Neer 85
McMahon, Sean, and Jo O’Donoghue. “Kiltartan.” Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish
Phrase and Fable. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. 436-37.
McMahon, Sean, and Jo O’Donoghue. Brewer’s Dictionary of Irish Phrase and
Fable. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.
O’Connor, Frank. A Short History of Irish Literature, A Backward Look. New York:
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