Irish women's writing, 1878–1922

Advancing the cause of liberty

Anna Pilz, Whitney Standlee, Whitney Standlee, Anna Pilz, Whitney Standlee

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781526127112
  9780719097584
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526100757
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: Literature

Irish women writers entered the British and international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. Literary history is only now beginning to give them the attention they deserve for their contributions to the literary landscape of Ireland, which has included far more women writers, with far more diverse identities, than hitherto acknowledged.

This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores how women writers including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, Ella Young and Beatrice Grimshaw used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. The chapters investigate their dialogue with a contemporary politics that included the topics of education, cosmopolitanism, language, empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, the marriage 'market', the publishing industry, readership(s), the commercial market and employment.

1

Works, righteousness, philanthropy, and the market in the novels of Charlotte Riddell

Patrick Maume

THE literature of the fin de siècle coexisted with that of older writers, who show how earlier literary tropes and cultural debates continued to influence the later period. The novels of Charlotte Riddell indicate that long-standing debates about the possibility of regenerating the Irish land system survived into the era of the Land War and the New Woman. Her references to a wide range of nineteenth-century Irish writers and her reimagining of contemporary events such as the murder of Lord Leitrim (1878) and the land agitation in Donegal reflect not only her own inability to turn her literary success into financial security but also a perceptible ambivalence on her part. This ambivalence is between a sense that the project of reforming Ireland through British capital directed by political economy has proved overambitious and a conviction that its opponents have nothing better to offer than self-indulgent fantasies represented by Charles Lever’s glorification of aristocratic paternalism or nationalist idealisations of the peasantry which ignore their improvidence and failure to accumulate capital. Riddell falls back on a tacitly Protestant-inspired belief that individual virtue takes precedence over external works and that Ireland’s well-being can only be secured through personal moral regeneration. This chapter compares her two Irish-set novels of the 1880s and her portrayal of Irish littérateurs negotiating the commercial constraints of London society and its literary market in the semi-autobiographical A Struggle for Fame (1883) with her earlier portrayal of a conflict between honest industry and aristocratic improvidence in The Earl’s Promise (1873) to show how her exploration of these themes reflects late Victorian self-questioning of earlier eras’ hopes for political economy or aristocratic regeneration.

Riddell was born Charlotte Elizabeth Cowan in Carrickfergus in 1832, the younger daughter of James Cowan, former sheriff of Co. Antrim, and his Liverpool-born wife Ellen Kilshaw. After her father’s death in 1850, she and her mother lived in genteel poverty at Dundonald in north Down before moving to London in 1855. Her mother died in 1856, and in the following year Charlotte married Joseph Hadley Riddell, a civil engineer and patent agent. She subsequently became a professional writer, initially publishing under pen names (notably F. G. Trafford), and, after 1864, as Mrs J. H. Riddell. Through her husband’s involvement in City schemes to exploit technical patents, Charlotte became acquainted with City finance, and the City often featured prominently in her fiction.¹ Unfortunately, however, his speculations and the debts of his relatives swallowed up Charlotte’s literary earnings from her most successful years in the 1860s and 1870s. When Joseph Riddell died in 1881, he left Riddell childless and financially insecure, and her poverty was exacerbated by the fact that he had over the course of their marriage pledged her literary copyrights as collateral for his debts.² Riddell later defended her husband’s actions, asserting that he was well-meaning and exploited, and the influence of his experiences on her fictional themes is evident in her repeated characterisations of men who suffer unjust accusations or support parasitic extended families.

Riddell moved between rented houses in the City and in the country just outside London. After her husband’s death, her urban residences became humbler and her suburban dwellings further from town. She rarely returned to Ireland but kept in touch with friends there; a tour of Donegal and western Ulster in 1885 produced a novel, The Nun’s Curse (1888). From the mid-1880s, her fortunes were affected by the decline of the three-volume novel and serial publication. Her ability to adapt to the changing publishing scene was diminished by age and breast cancer. In a reflection of the author’s own financial circumstances, Glenarva Westley in A Struggle for Fame is told by a hostile publisher, ‘I can see very clearly what the result of your career will be. You’ll have to appeal to the Royal Literary Fund, and we’ll see then whether you like their terms better than mine.’³ From 1901, Riddell became the first author paid a pension (as distinct from one-off grants) by the fund.⁴ She died in 1906 in Middlesex.⁵

Charlotte Riddell may seem incongruous among fin-de-siècle Irish women writers. Her first novel appeared in 1856, and she favoured such mid-Victorian genres as the sensation novel, with elaborate inheritance plots and ghost stories à la Sheridan Le Fanu. Indeed, Riddell’s novels are often set some decades before their publication, in the world of her youth or her parents’ maturity (one recurring theme is contempt for the artificial girlishness in dress and manner projected by Regency fashion), and she uses hindsight to reflect on how the problems of the time when she writes developed out of the earlier society which she remembers. Although she was still writing during the final two decades of the century (her last novel appeared in 1902 and some of her more successful works had one-volume reprints c. 1900), she derived no benefit from them due to the sale of the copyrights.

Riddell was a prolific commercial novelist whose works fit the Jamesian dismissal of Victorian novels as ‘loose baggy monsters’.⁶ Frequently, she inserts moralising interjections, often with the aid of scriptural quotations, to steer readers’ responses. In her writing technique, she began by devising an ending and worked towards it so that plot elements abruptly vanish and seemingly major characters fizzle into insignificance as she runs out of space. Plot summaries can be misleading, since characters important in the overall structure may only appear summarily, while apparently less central or less sympathetic characters are explored in greater depth.⁷

Nevertheless, Riddell is a significant figure in the late Victorian Irish novel because her commercial approach led her to address new literary fashions and struggle to adopt established – often exhausted – literary tropes to changing situations.⁸ This chapter analyses some underlying themes of Riddell’s work. In particular, it considers her relationship to the Irish national tale genre, established in the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, it outlines Riddell’s engagement with the tension between ‘improving’ economic rationalisation and supposedly pre-capitalist modes of landlordism as presented by earlier writers such as Maria Edgeworth and Charles Lever and raised anew by Gladstonian reform. It establishes the discourse between rationalist visions of human perfectibility through socio-economic reform and the traditional evangelical view that without inner faith such reform amounted to mere ‘works-righteousness’, whereby external accomplishments would be hollow without a corresponding inner moral transformation. And, finally, it elaborates on Riddell’s negotiations with the moral ambiguities of philanthropy, Victorian concerns with social status, and attitudes to the ‘fallen woman’. It principally analyses her four Irish novels – Maxwell Drewitt (1865), The Earl’s Promise, Berna Boyle (1884), and The Nun’s Curse – alongside A Struggle for Fame, with its ‘Micks on the Make’ in London literary circles. Some earlier works are included here to place her later novels – the primary focus of the chapter – in the context of her oeuvre and of ongoing contemporary debates over the problems of Victorian Ireland.

Riddell, the Irish national tale, and the limits of Edgeworthian rationalism

A DESCRIPTION of Riddell’s character Gorman Muir in her novel Berna Boyle provides evidence, both conspicuous and subtle, of her connection to Irish literary antecedents:

The man [Gorman Muir] was nearly eight-and-twenty, yet romance was as strong in him as in a schoolboy. He devoutly believed in Tom Burke of Ours and the doings of Charles O’Malley [novels of military life by Charles Lever]. ‘The Collegians’ [by Gerald Griffin] woke a responsive echo in his soul – and he could sing the song, ‘A place in thy memory, dearest’ [also by Griffin], with such mournful pathos that old ladies wept, and at the same time with such seductive tenderness that young ladies felt they could almost have gone off with him on the spot... . ‘The Charge at Fontenoy’ [ballad by Thomas Davis] thrilled his very soul. He felt more than half-rebel when he read the short and stirring story of that gallant, if mistaken band of ‘United Irish’ gentlemen who paid the penalty of their lives for their patriotism; but when he turned back the page of Irish history to the siege of Derry he felt he saw written there a grander narrative still ... He was one left over, as it might seem, by mistake from a generation long dead and gone, and yet with a love of pleasure and a capacity for settling to no work, and a thorough enjoyment in idleness which is the proud possession of the nineteenth century.⁹

Her novel A Struggle for Fame likewise confirms these associations by tacitly rewriting a text from the first nineteenth-century wave of Irish romantic antiquarianism, Lady Morgan’s national tale The Wild Irish Girl (1806). Riddell’s protagonist Glenarva, brought up as a vigorous tomboy on a remote sea shore by a dispossessed and enfeebled father, echoes Lady Morgan’s similarly named heroine Glorvina. Yet where Glorvina’s ancestors were dispossessed by conquest which can be reversed through a reconciliatory marriage, Glenarva is impoverished through her father’s partnership in a failed bank and abandons sublime provincial isolation for the wider commercial world of London. Once there, she discovers that readers are tired of Irish stories: ‘If Lady Morgan or Miss Edgeworth, or Banim, or Carleton, were to return to life and offer an Irish story ... they would have none of it.’¹⁰ Glenarva thus relocates a story based on Co. Antrim memories to the Yorkshire seacoast, of which she knows nothing; with longer residence in England and marriage to an Englishman, she adopts London and Home Counties settings in her mature work.¹¹ Riddell herself set novels in Ireland throughout her literary career, but these appeared at periods of increased English interest in Ireland: Maxwell Drewitt may capitalise on interest provoked by the Fenian movement, The Earl’s Promise responds to the Irish reforms of Gladstone’s first government, and Berna Boyle and The Nun’s Curse are linked to Irish land agitation of the 1880s and Ulster unionism.

Although Riddell touches the romantic sublime in describing landscapes, her attitude to the Irish literary tradition is determinedly commonsensical and anti-romantic, expressed by vigorous critical dialogue with earlier Irish writers familiar to an English readership. In The Nun’s Curse, the weak but well-meaning landlord Terence Conway is engaged to the fashionable, self-righteous and cold-hearted heiress Philippa Dutton. While Philippa delays the wedding, Terence in Donegal encounters the disreputable horse-dealer Daniel Walley, whose manipulation of Terence by introducing him to the local shooting, fishing, and whiskey punch may comment on ‘rollicking’ literary celebrations – as in the early novels of Charles Lever – of a feudal bond supposedly cemented by shared participation in alcohol and the wild sports of the west. Terence thus comes into contact with Walley’s daughter Grace, whom he seduces and impregnates. Terence’s unsuccessful attempts to shake off Grace and her father, before and after his disastrous marriage to Grace at the insistence of the jealous Philippa, are punctuated with ironic references to Thomas Moore’s Irish Melody ‘Lesbia Hath a Beaming Eye’, which contrasts the artificial charms of fashionable ‘Lesbia’ with an idealised peasant girl, ‘gentle, bashful Nora Creina’.¹²

Two authors are particularly relevant to Riddell’s treatment of Ireland. The first is Maria Edgeworth, whose critique of Irish land management is echoed in more forcefully capitalistic ways in Riddell’s work. Riddell insisted on rationalist moral reform and responsible estate management, lending encouragement to later schemes to solve Ireland’s problems by restructuring her agrarian system on the basis of clear title, rationalised holdings, a commercial society based on wage labour, and regeneration through outside investment. These schemes were more expressly capitalist than Edgeworth’s, who displayed a certain unease about completely replacing personal quasi-feudal loyalties by the cash nexus. Riddell, whose City connections led her to emphasise the distinction between venture capitalist and manager, is more akin to later projectors than to Edgeworth, and her belief in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Works, righteousness, philanthropy, and the market in the novels of Charlotte Riddell
• 2 ‘She’s nothin’ but a shadda’: the politics of marriage in late Mulholland
• 3 Nature, education, and liberty in The Book of Gilly by Emily Lawless
• 4 Girls with ‘go’: female homosociality in L. T. Meade’s schoolgirl novels
• 5 ‘Breaking away’: Beatrice Grimshaw and the commercial woman writer
• 6 Women, ambition, and the city, 1890–1910
• 7 ‘An Irish problem’: bilingual manoeuvres in the work of Somerville and Ross
• 8 ‘A bad master’: religion, Jacobitism, and the politics of representation in Lady Gregory’s The White Cockade
• 9 ‘Old wine in new bottles’? Katharine Tynan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, and George Wyndham
• 10 ‘The blind side of the heart’: Protestants, politics, and patriarchy in the novels of F. E. Crichton
• 11 ‘The Red Sunrise’: gender, violence, and nation in Ella Young’s vision of a new Ireland
• 12 Liberté, égalité, sororité: the poetics of suffrage in the work of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markievicz
• Bibliography
• Index