National Treasures and Nationalist Gardens: Unlocking the Archival Mysteries of Bean na h-Éireann

“Who wrote ‘bitch’ in the margin next to Anna Parnell’s name?” This quotation is a fragment from my research notebook. I was working in the National Library of Ireland, in June 1998, sitting with a copy of R. M. Fox’s Rebel Irishwomen (1935), a long out-of-print text that offers biographies of women committed to the Irish nationalist movement.¹ Was this penciledin “bitch” evidence of some bored student, writing a note to a friend in class while teachers weren’t looking? Or was the rude comment meant, as I intuited from its position next to her name, for Anna Parnell herself, the firebrand sister of “Ireland’s Uncrowned King,” Charles Stewart Parnell? Could it have been meant for Helena Molony, the subject of Fox’s essay, whose dealings with Anna Parnell had often been contentious? Staring at the pages, I couldn’t help but wonder who had sat with that text in the past, what reader had chosen to deface it, and why. The archives of the National Library of Ireland and the Kilmainham Gaol Museum are full of many such mysteries about the women who fought for Ireland’s independence.

I was in Dublin to research women and nationalism in Ireland from the 1880s through the 1940s for my dissertation, which I hoped would bridge a study of women’s nationalist activism in Ireland with an examination of women’s modernist fiction. I had noticed the antinationalist vein in Virginia Woolf’s novels of the 1930s and considered that her knowledge of women’s political activism in Ireland might have added to her general understanding of the subject. Political independence had proven to be a Pyrrhic victory for nationalist women seeking a voice in the affairs of the new nation. The emerging story I was piecing together in the archives suggested that Woolf’s skepticism in her essays and fiction about nationalism’s value for women might have historical precedents in the women who fought in the Easter Rising, the Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War. The dissertation started off as an attempt to broaden my critical understanding of Woolf, but the powerful stories of women like Helena Molony, Maud Gonne MacBride, Constance Markievicz, and many others soon competed for my attention. These women deserved to be more than a footnote to my reading of Woolf’s Three Guineas or The Years, and I hoped that I would uncover more details of their stories in the archives in Dublin. I was new to archival research, working from the few scholarly texts available on Irish women in this period. I was grateful to be the first recipient of a dissertation fellowship from the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University, which provided the means to spend time in Dublin. As a literary scholar, I was trained in the textual analysis of novels, not historical documents, but I wanted to see what the historical archives could offer an essentially literary project.

I went to Ireland with a laundry list of things to find, drawn largely from the work of Sinead McCoole, whose Guns and Chiffon: Women Revolutionaries and the Kilmainham Gaol exhibition catalog had first introduced me to the women I was studying.² I had entered my Master of Arts program at NYU in 1991 convinced that I would eventually write a dissertation on Yeats, but instead found myself most attracted to the women who were mentioned and yet marginalized in his poetry, particularly Maud Gonne MacBride and Constance Markievicz. I also arrived in Dublin wanting to know more about Bean na h-Éireann, the first “ladies’ journal” in Ireland, founded by the Inghinidhe na h-Éireann, Maud Gonne MacBride’s “Daughters of Ireland.” The Inghinidhe na h-Éireann had been instrumental in the forming of the Irish National Theatre and in keeping the tradition of physical force nationalism alive in the early years of the century. The few critical references I had found regarding Bean na h-Éireann were tantalizing—a newspaper for Irish women, combining...