Women writers were revolutionary

IN TERMS of Irish revolutionaries, we tend to think of James Connolly and Padraig Pearse manning the barricades of the GPO. However, few think of Irish women writers and how they changed how Ireland thought about itself and how they helped to shape social change. Moreover, these women—Lady Gregory and Edna O’Brien—who were at the forefronts of radicalism, came from the most unlikely of backgrounds to have been advocates of these revolutionary views that would help to shape contemporary Irish society.

Lady Gregory and cultural Nationalism

Lady Gregory could not have been a more unlikely figure in leading the cultural nationalism which would take Ireland on the road to independence.

Isabella Augusta Persse was born in 1852, at Roxburgh in County Galway on her 6000-acre family estate. Her family were firmly Protestant Anglo-Irish aristocracy who strongly identified with British rule in Ireland and its imperial presence across the globe. Her husband, Sir William Gregory, who was 36 years her senior, had been Governor of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and a Conservative MP for Galway. The Gregorys had a house in London where they held weekly salons where literary greats such as Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning would recite their works.

In short, Lady Gregory was the epitome of Anglo-Irish Conservativism, Unionism and British Imperialism, yet she would become a leading figure in establishing Irish cultural nationalism.

Her conversion to the Nationalist cause lay in her childhood education. She was schooled at home by her Irish Catholic nanny, Mary Sheridan, who was a native Irish speaker and who introduced the young Augusta to the history and legends of the local area of Kiltartan and Irish mythical characters such as Finn McCool (Fionn mac Cumhaill).

Her husband’s death in 1892 liberated Gregory to follow her own independent path, she observed that: “Had I not been widowed I should not have found the detachment of mind... to give full insight into my character,” and that character would be pivotal in reviving Ireland’s identity through cultural Nationalism.

After her husband passed away, Gregory began spending more time Galway where she organised Irish language lessons at the local school in Coole as well as collecting tales of local myths around the Kiltartan area. She published these Irish stories in literary volumes including Gods and Fighting Men (1902). It was in this time that she met WB Yeats and they founded the Irish Literary Theatre which would eventually become the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, whose mission it was to re-Irish the national culture.

In taking her passion for Irish folklore from Galway to Dublin, Gregory was moving from the local theatre to the centre stage of Irish national culture. It was during her time in Dublin that she moved in the same literary and political circles as other aristocratic women such as Countess Markievicz. These women began to reject their birthright of being of the British ruling class, in favour of Irishness—and in Markievicz case also embracing socialism. In spite of material benefits of privilege and wealth by being part of the British ruling elite whose empire was at the height of its power: Gregory, Markievicz and other women of their social standing chose to identify as being Irish.

In the decade before the Great War, Gregory and her fellow aristocratic travellers were shedding their imperial identity and language as expressed by the imperial writer Rudyard Kipling who glorified the British Empire. In its place they were rediscovering their Gaelic tongue to retell the myths of Celtic fighting heroes of ancient Irish legend as means of combatting the British Imperial project in Ireland. Their cultural revival of Irishness would contribute to the growing sense of nationalism which would culminate in the Easter Rising of 1916.

However, when the Great War broke out her son William—like so many other Irishmen—volunteered to fight for Britain. He joined the RAF and was killed in action in 1918. Yet his death and commemoration of him by WB. Yeats was not framed in Kipling’s jingoistic language who saw fighting for Britain against Germany as a noble sacrifice, but as an Irishman whose loyalty to was to Erin and his local Kiltartan kinfolk. His lyrical epitaph An Irish Airman Foresees His Death articulated this sentiment that the Irish were a separate nation and that there would be no more Irish blood senselessly spilt on behalf of Britain:

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above,

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.

During the 1920s, although in her 70s, Gregory was still active on the board of the Abbey Theatre and was instrumental in maintaining its artistic freedom from petty interfering Free State bureaucrats who sought to censor Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars.

In 1932, she died aged 80 of breast cancer, at home in her beloved Coole Park in Galway. During Lady Gregory’s life her impact was so significant that George Bernard Shaw described her as ‘the greatest living Irish woman.’ Indeed, her literary legacy remains monumental. In 2020, Trinity College Dublin, announced four new busts to added to its men only pantheon of forty Ireland’s Greatest thinkers, Lady Gregory was one of these sculptures. The Anglo-Irish aristocrat Lady Gregory would rightfully take her place beside her beloved WB Yeats as one of Ireland’s greatest literary figures.

Edna O’Brien and the sexual revolution

If Lady Gregory was an unlikely leading figure in Ireland’s cultural Nationalism, then another west country woman would have a similar impact on the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Josephine Edna O’Brien could have not been a more unlikely figure as feminist icon of sexual revolution that swept across the globe during the swinging sixties.

O’Brien was born in 1930 in County Clare into a farming family who were very traditional and conservative Catholic in their ways. Her father was a gambler and drinker who had frittered away what was the left of the family wealth and her mother was a strong controlling woman who had been a maid before she married. The young O’Brien was educated at convent school and trained and qualified as a pharmacist in Dublin. However, it was during her college studies she began to read James Joyce, and this inspired her to write, despite her mother’s strong disapproval.

In 1959, with her then husband and fellow Irish writer Ernest Gebler, the family moved to London. By the time her groundbreaking debut novel Country Girls became an international success in 1960 she had two children and was living in suburbia. The book, which was the first of a trilogy of novels, was banned in Ireland because of its frank portrayal of the sex lives of its characters. O’Brien was accused of corrupting the minds of young Irish women and denounced from the pulpit. Although, by today’s standards, O’Brien’s novels would seem tame in their subject matter, in 1960s Ireland, they were deemed to be scandalous to the point of undermining the institution of

marriage. O’Brien later commented: “I felt no fame. I was married. I had young children. All I could hear out of Ireland from my mother and anonymous letters was bile, odium and outrage.”

The success and scandal that came with her writing put a strain on her marriage, with O’Brien claiming that her writer husband could not cope with her success and wealth. When she divorced and was fighting for the custody of her children, her husband’s QC presented a copy of a magazine headline ‘O’Brien tosses a molotov cocktail through the stained-glass window of marriage,’ as evidence that she was an unfit mother. However, the judge gave her custody of her two young boys.

Although, seen as a pariah in Ireland, O’Brien’s books met with international acclaim and with her newfound fame she began to live the life of wealthy independent woman. She was often seen in the company of film stars and musicians, with Marlon Brandon and Paul McCartney being counted among her friends. The Beatle, whilst visiting her home and helping to put her children to bed, penned a typical McCartney lullaby which summed up her influence in the pop cultural world of the swinging 60s: “O, Edna O’Brien, She ain’t lying, You gotta listen, To what she gotta say… She’ll blow your mind away.” The country girl had travelled a long and winding road from her rural life in County Clare.

When she returned to Ireland in the 1990s to research her book House of Splendid Isolation (1994) about a Republican who goes on the run, she again became the subject of scandal. Part of her research involved visiting Dominic McGlinchey who she described a ‘grave and reflective man... she liked everything about him except what he was…” This and other statements caused outrage, and she had to refute claims in the Irish press that she had an affair with the Republican. Throughout her life, O’Brien, like Joyce, was an Irish writer who would never be fully accepted or understood in her own country and in her own time and therefore chose to live a life of self-exile.

In 2024, following a long illness O’Brien died in London aged 93, she was buried in Holy Island on Lough Derg, County Clare. President Michael Higgins wrote of her passing that she ‘was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of the women of Ireland.. and played an important role of transforming the status of women across Irish society.”

The legacy of the West Country Girls

Lady Gregory and Edna O’Brien were the most unlikely of Irish cultural revolutionaries. Yet, through their writing and in their personal lives they demonstrated to Irish women that there was different way of seeing themselves and an alternative way of living their lives. Both were extraordinary women, and they have left their mark on the cultural landscape of Ireland.

Dr David McKinstry is a teacher and poet whose poems are widely published and broadcast across Ireland and in the UK. If any readers wish to share their literary output with him, they can contact him at: davmick38h@yahoo.co.uk