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  • Anglo-Irish Autobiography: Class, Gender, and the Forms of Narrative
  • Heather Bryant Jordan
Anglo-Irish Autobiography: Class, Gender, and the Forms of Narrative. by Elizabeth Grubgeld , pp. 181. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004. $45 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Elizabeth Grubgeld's study of Anglo-Irish autobiography takes a refreshing look at a little-known literary tradition of Ascendancy Ireland. By its nature, writing about the self encompasses anachronistic, and sometimes chaotic attempts to categorize the random and compelling experiences of a life. Grubgeld asserts that autobiography represents "a volatile meeting point of personal and public experience." In examining two centuries of writing about the self through the lens of class, gender, and narrative form, Grubgeld gives new vigor to neglected works. She follows George Bernard Shaw's definition of the impulse beneath much of this discourse: "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance."

After the introduction, where she describes the creation of these imaginative works as based upon an assumption of membership in "an opposition," Grubgeld organizes the book into five succinct chapters. By viewing a range of authors—among them poets, novelists, and playwrights—through narrative trope, rather than by focusing on individual accounts, she emphasizes the creative interplay among the works. In her first chapter, "Place, Patronym, and the Literary Childhood," she discusses the understanding of landscape and birth being at the center of these writers' consciousness. She arranges an eclectic, and sometimes obscure, group of writers, including Katherine Everett, Lionel Fleming, Mary Hamilton, Samuel Hussey, and William Trench, and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Sir Bernard Burke, Shane Leslie, Emily Lawless, Stephen Gwynne, Lady Glover, and T. R. Henn the last of whom coined the term "family mythologem," to explain the constructs behind such elaborate opining on history and patrilineage.

In the second chapter, "The Daughter and Her Patrimony," Grubgeld takes an extended look at the autobiographies of the young girls who grew to be the [End Page 152] women of the Big Houses. She explores the works of Augusta Gregory and Elizabeth Bowen, who "chose to build their life stories upon the framework of the family property." While Lady Gregory could never own Coole Park outright, and although Bowen castigated herself for being the "weak link in the chain of primogeniture" because she was not born the Robert her parents expected, both women chose private writing made public to explore their relation to the past. According to Grubgeld, both Gregory and Bowen—and many other women who wrote their life stories in the 1940s and 1950s—demonstrate a necessary "rethinking of the relations between identity and property." The relationship is complex, as the writers themselves understood; in A Lady's Child (1941), Enid Starkie, described her autobiographical project as an attempt to explore the "sticky lump" of the private existence of her family. One of the most original portions of the book, this chapter compels a reader to rethink the connection between past and present in the works of women. Grubgeld's rediscovery of these writings—which have often been overlooked, or discussed solely in terms of social or political considerations—provides a lens through which to view the coming-of-age of many women writers of this century. What made these writings particularly engaging, according to Grubgeld, lies in the fact that these writers were themselves enmeshed in a sea change of "class relations and gender roles" at the same time that they were watching their own parents "undergo a precipitous loss of status and property in Irish society."

Grubgeld places Elizabeth Bowen at the center of this maelstrom, correctly perceiving the importance of her tight linkage of the private and the public. Autobiography, as a genre, derives its interest from the close intersection of the desire to live an intimate life and at the same time, to explore that existence in a more public sphere. Bowen herself was keenly aware of the tenuous balance among these many lives. Seven Winters and Bowen's Court, both written during the Second World War, attempt to imbue land and property with an enduring aliveness, approaching immortality. She writes in the story of her own Big House in County...

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