In Sunlight and in Shadow

Irish history casts a long shadow on contemporary Irish culture. Amidst the bright prosperity of recent years that shadow has sometimes receded from view. And in youthful stylish Dublin, with its ubiquitous mobile phones and thriving Internet cafes, it often seems to have vanished. But, in two recent books on Irish history, literature, and culture, the shadow of the past is not only present but very much in the foreground.

Richard Tillinghast's Finding Ireland is a gathering of memoirs, travelogues, reviews, "letters from Ireland," and familiar essays, in which the American poet explores Irish culture mainly through the works of modern Irish writers. A longtime sojourner in Ireland, Tillinghast now lives in retirement in County Tipperary. In the manner of an informed "blow-in" speaking to the less informed, he endeavors to cross what he calls the "oceans of sentimentality and prejudice [that] keep us from seeing the Irish in their true complexity." In tones ranging from the professorial to the celebrative to the elegiac, he writes with authority on subjects as diverse as the poetry of Derek Mahon, the fiction of William Trevor, the plays of Brian Friel, the felicities of Irish traditional music, and the surviving pleasures of rural Irish life, where "there is still a place by the fire and a cup of tea for the visitor in a farmhouse kitchen." Though his book has the look of a miscellany, its center of gravity may be found in the poet's intellectual passions, namely Anglo-Irish culture and modern Irish poetry.

Jonathan Swift, the first major Anglo-Irish writer, described his people as "strangers in a strange land." And Yeats, two centuries later, spoke of "Anglo-Irish solitude." In "Who Were the Anglo-Irish?" Tillinghast embraces these descriptions, portraying a culture that enjoyed its heyday in the late eighteenth century and declined thereafter, becoming ever more isolated and insecure. Distrusted by the Irish and English alike, the Anglo-Irish lived apart in their big country houses, watching the Protestant Ascendancy become what Julian Moynahan has called a "Descendancy," its power eroded by Catholic Emancipation, the Great Famine, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, and the Land Law Act of 1881. Yet, as Tillinghast notes, the "existential insecurity" and "heightened awareness" of the Anglo-Irish fostered a "golden age" of Anglo-Irish writing, which includes the novels of Maria Edgeworth; the diaries, letters, and fictions of Somerville and Ross; and the major works of the Irish Literary Revival. Concurrently the "hybrid" nature of Anglo-Irish culture nourished a distinctive literary tradition, beginning with Maria Edgeworth and continuing through the fiction of George Moore, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Trevor. "Year by year from 1800 on," writes Tilling-hast, "as their position became less and less tenable, the heart and pluck and humor of those whom Yeats called 'the indomitable Irishry' built from words a hybrid body of work that will stand with the world's best."

Turning to specific authors, Tillinghast discusses their distinct contributions to the Anglo-Irish tradition. In "The Uneasy World of Somerville and Ross" he rejects the common view that the coauthors romanticized the Ascendancy and portrayed sentimentalized stage-Irish characters. In Tillinghast's view they offered a "vigorous realism" that extended to their portrayal of servants' lives, and they were "deeply implicated" in the "ironies and tragedies of Irish history." In "The Asymmetrical George Moore" he defines Moore as a "nationalist" who differed "from others in the movement by his complete lack of idealism and patriotic sentiment." In "Elizabeth Bowen: The House, the Hotel, and the Child" he opposes the view of Bowen as a class-ridden snob, seeing her instead as a writer who "took the world as she found it." And in his essay on William Trevor he identifies Trevor as a "Protestant-Irish and English" author whose interest lies not in politics, history, and class in...