Emily Lawless

Emily Lawless (1845-1913), With The Wild Geese (1902). Courtesy Internet Archive.

Emily Lawless (17 June 1845 - 19 October 1913) was an Irish poet and novelist.

Life

Overview

Lawless was born at Lyons, co. Kildare, June 17 1845, daughter of the 3rd Baron Cloncurry. She wrote a number of novels and verses dealing with Irish life. Of her novels Hurrish (1886), With Essex in Ireland (1890) and Grania (1902) are the most important, and of her verses With the Wild Geese (1902) is the best-known volume. She was given an honorary degree at Dublin University in 1905. She died at Gomshall, Surrey, October 19 1913.

Youth and education

Lawless was born at Lyons House, near Hazelhatch, Co. Kildare, 4th child and eldest daughter of Edward Lawless (1816–69), a wealthy landlord who in 1853 succeeded as 3rd baron Cloncurry, and his wife Elizabeth (née Kirwan), a famous society beauty.

The greater part of her childhood was spent at Lyons, and throughout the summers at her mother's family home, Castle Hackett, near Tuam, co. Galway. Lawless was closer to the Kirwans than to her father's family; she draws on their memories of the Famine in some of her writings, and while her elder brother, Valentine, 4th baron Cloncurry (1840–1928), engaged in large-scale conflict with the Land League on his Kildare estates, her portrayals of the land war and the landlords’ dilemma owe more to the Kirwans’ experience as improving landlords in Galway.

A keen horsewoman, swimmer, and outdoor painter, from an early age she was also an avid reader. However, as her own recollections indicate, her initial passion was for science, particularly entomology and botany, and as a young woman she contributed articles on natural history to the Entomologist's Monthly Magazine (January 1867) and the Entomologist (April, May 1872), though her scientific activities were hindered by gender restrictions.

Career

After her father's suicide (1869) Lawless became her mother's constant companion. The women divided their time between the Lawless Dublin residence (Maretimo House, Blackrock, co. Dublin), their rented London home, and numerous extended visits to the Continent.

Emily began writing fiction in the early 1880s, having received encouragement from the Scottish novelist Margaret Oliphant. Her earliest efforts – A Chelsea householder (1882), published anonymously, and A millionaire's cousin (1885) – failed to make any significant impression, and it was not till the appearance of her 3rd novel, Hurrish (1886), that she won both critical and popular acclaim, particularly in Britain.

Lawless's own politics were always determined by her ascendancy background. She remained a unionist throughout, and consistently maintained that the Irish were unready for home rule. Nevertheless, she was critical of England's treatment of Ireland.

After the upheaval of the land wars she was based primarily in London, where she became a well-known figure in artistic circles. Yet her continuing interest in Ireland was reflected in her subsequent literary output. Her work from the period includes a capable single-volume history of Ireland (1887), written as part of the ‘Story of the Nations’ series, and a documentary-style novel, With Essex in Ireland (1890).

Her most popular book, Grania, a romantic tragedy set on the Aran Islands, appeared in 1892. Its admirers included W.E.H. Lecky), who became a close friend, George Meredith, and Swinburne, who hailed it as ‘one of the most exquisite and perfect works of genius in the English language’.

Lawless was acquainted with Augusta Gregory and occasionally met Yeats at Coole Park, but their sensibilities clashed. Yeats was repelled by her scientism and post-Darwinian agnosticism, complaining that she attributed spiritual significance to the mere size of the universe; Lawless criticised Yeats for attaching more importance to the pursuit of literary perfection than to social responsibilities. (Irresponsible, destructive aesthetes are recurrent figures in Lawless's work; Gregory attributed this to a temperament inherited from the 1st Lord Cloncurry – a carpet merchant who bought his peerage – but it reflects a late Romantic anxiety found in such works as Tennyson's ‘Lady of Shalott’).

Lawless's mature years were blighted by the suicides of her sisters Mary (1885) and Rose (1891) and her own deteriorating health, drug addiction, and depression, described by her cousin and close friend Sir Horace Plunkett (qv) as ‘nervous torture’. She was tormented by her inability to accept orthodox Christianity or the Darwinian image of a coldly indifferent universe and became a stoic with pantheist tendencies. She also developed a fascination with devotional peasant Catholicism and occasionally corresponded with the catholic modernist George Tyrrell.

After the death of her mother (April 1895) she retired to Surrey, where she built a cottage and concentrated on gardening. The last 18 years of her life were spent there in almost total seclusion with her companion – possibly her lover – Lady Sarah Spencer, sister of the former viceroy, Earl Spencer.

She died 19 October 1913 at her residence, Hazelhatch, near Gomshall, Surrey.

Writing

Although Lawless's literary prominence and interest in the west of Ireland made her a significant figure for the writers of the early Irish Literary Revival, she is generally seen as peripheral to the Revival itself. This may reflect W.B. Yeats's presentation of the Revival as growing out of the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell; she would be less dissonant in the alternative model, proposed by R.F. Foster, which sees it as a response to the Land War.

Prose

Set in the west of Ireland, Hurrish (1886) derived its popularity in part from the widespread interest in Irish affairs that existed during the build-up to the 1st home rule bill. However, while the book established her reputation in Britain, and won her the admiration of W.E. Gladstone (with whom she had a sporadic correspondence), her depiction of the Irish peasantry came under attack from the Irish nationalist press, particularly the reviewers of the Nation, who accused her of exaggerating peasant violence, in terms reminiscent of later critiques of J. M. Synge's Playboy of the western world. Her friend Augusta, Lady Gregory, expressed similar concerns on rereading the book in 1929. Critical of its ‘patronising tone’, she expressed regret that ‘it had been accepted in London as a picture of Irish life’ (Gregory journals, 419).

Synge's portrayal of the Aran islands lays claim to an intimacy acquired through prolonged residence among the islanders, which is contrasted with Lawless's romanticised view based on distant observation. Lawless's literary cousin Lord Dunsany, while more sympathetic to her unionism than the Revival writers, was equally unsympathetic to her scientific worldview; he fantasised that she was really a witch who reanimated fossils by magic, turning them back to stone when they bit her.

With Essex in Ireland (1890), a fictionalised 1st-person account of Essex's 1599 expedition to Ireland, which was initially thought by many (including Gladstone) to be an authentic historical document, was included by W.B. Yeats in 1895 on a list of the 13 best works of Irish fiction.

At the end of the 20th century Grania (1892) attracted renewed attention because of its portrayal of a strong woman pushed by her restricted circumstances towards a destructive relationship with a weak, self-indulgent man. Lawless's views, however, cannot be straightforwardly equated with 20th-century feminism; she shared the view of her friend and literary mentor, Mrs Humphrey Ward, that while women should be active in social work and education, they were unsuited to political careers, and in 1899 she signed the ‘Appeal against women's suffrage’ organised by Ward and other prominent women.

Among her other books are Major Lawrence, F.L.S. (1887); Plain Frances Mowbray and other tales (1889); her novel on the Desmond rebellion, Maelcho (1894); Traits and confidences (1898), which includes some childhood recollections; A garden diary (1901), which contains meditations on public and private affairs, with accounts of her horticultural experiences; a poorly received biography of Maria Edgeworth (qv) (1904); and her children's story, The book of Gilly (1906). Another historical novel, A soldier of the empire (1895), set in 18th-century Ireland, was published in America only.

Her final novel, The race of Castlebar (1913), set during the United Irish rebellion, was completed by Shan Bullock.

Poetry

Lawless also produced verse, in which traces of romantic nationalism, absent from her fiction, are often evident. Her debu collection, Atlantic Rhymes and Rhythms (1898), was originally printed for circulation among her friends; however, she was encouraged by Stopford A. Brooke to reissue the poems in With the Wild Geese (1902). Some of her verses on the plight of 18th-century catholics in exile and under the penal laws became her best-remembered work, often included in anthologies and even in Irish school textbooks.

With the Wild Geese was followed by A Point of View (1909), published in aid of impoverished Galway fishermen, and The Inalienable Heritage (1914), which she was revising at the time of her death.

Her body of work also includes contributions to numerous magazines and journals, such as the Living Age, Cornhill Magazine, Belgravia, the National Review, the Irish Homestead, and the Nineteenth Century.

Critical introduction

by Mary Augusta Ward

It was as a delightful novelist that Emily Lawless originally became known to the world. In the 2 studies of peasant life in Western Ireland, Hurrish and Grania, she embodied her own close and tender knowledge of the Clare and Galway country — its landscape, its people, its laughter, its tragedies, and all its wild natural life; while in the 2 historical novels or quasi-novels of Maelcho and With Essex in Ireland, she brought imagination, and a passionate sympathy, to bear on the historical wrongs and miseries of the land she loved.

She belonged to one of the Anglo-Irish families, who represent in that tormented country the only fusion so far attained there between the English and Irish tempers. Her grandfather was imprisoned in the Tower in 1798 for complicity with the United Irish conspiracy, but the ex-rebel ended his days as an English peer, the husband of a Scottish wife, and an enlightened landowner in Kildare, devoted to the interests of his tenantry and estates. Down to the last generation the family was Catholic, and kinsmen of Emily Lawless had fought valiantly for Catholic emancipation and hotly opposed the Union. A Lawless — probably of her blood — became a member of the latest Irish Legion fighting for France, on his escape from Ireland after the collapse of the rebellion of ’98.

In spite, therefore, of her many English friends and connexions, Emily Lawless was by nature and feeling a patriotic Irishwoman, with a full share of Irish humour and Irish poetry. Her childhood and youth were passed in a free open-air life, now among the woods and fields of Mid Ireland, now by the sea. She became a considerable naturalist, a great reader, and a dreamer whose dreams took shape, at first in her novels, and then in her few poems. If Mr. Yeats’s verse is steeped in the mists and the magic of Ireland, if Moira O’Neill in The Glens of Antrim reflects the Irish simplicity — which is neither sentimental nor insipid, but touched, always, at the heart of it, with irony and pity — Emily Lawless’s best poems strike a sombre and powerful note, stirred in her, it would seem, by the grandeur of the Atlantic coast she knew so well, and by long brooding over the history of Ireland. There is passion in it—passion, one might almost think, of vicarious pain—working in one who felt in herself the blood of both peoples, of the oppressor and the oppressed.

The Wild Geese was the name given by the romantic and sorrowful imagination of the Irish to those exiled sons of Ireland who, after Limerick and the Boyne, migrated in their thousands over seas, and fought against England in half the armies of the Continent. They avenged Limerick at Fontenoy, and were still — under Napoleon — fighting out the issues of 1689, when the nineteenth century dawned. The cry of Ireland to these cast-out sons of hers is finely given in After Aughrim (the battle fought after the taking of Athlone in 1691); and the yearning of the Irish fugitives for their lost country breathes in the beautiful twin-poems “Before the Battle” and “After the Battle”—the first expressing the hunger of the Irishman for battle, for revenge, and the native land he will never see again; and the second, a vision of the triumphant dead coming home at last to “the stony hills of Clare.”

But the noblest poem of them all is the "Dirge of the Munster Forest". The forests of Ireland had sheltered the Irish forces of the Desmonds in the ghastly war of 1581; and in the devastation that followed on their defeat, the forests were not forgotten by the victors. They had given shelter to the rebels, and like them they were ruthlessly slain. The invitation of the Forest to her own funeral feast is vividly and masterly felt. There are some Elizabethan echoes in it, as befits its supposed date. But as a whole, it has the true “inevitable” ring; it could not have been said otherwise; and it ought to keep eternally green the memory of a brave and gifted woman.

She died in 1913, after a long and wearing illness, in which, almost to the end, scarcely any of her friends guessed what she had suffered, so high was her Irish courage, and so indomitable her Irish wit and her warm Irish heart.

Recognition

Lawless was awarded an honorary D.Litt (Dubl.) in 1905.

2 of her poems, "Clare Coast" and "After Aughrim", were included in the Oxford Book of Irish Verse (1958).

A book of criticism on Lawless – Emily Lawless (1845-1913): Writing the interspace by Heidi Hansson – was published in 2007 by Cork University Press.

Publications

Poetry

• Atlantic Rhymes & Rhythms. London: privately published, 1898.
• With The Wild Geese (with introduction by Stopford A. Brooke). London: Isbister, 1902.
• The Inalienable Heritage, and other poems. Suffolk, UK: privately published, printed by Richard Clay, 1914.
• Poems. Dublin: Dolmen Press, for An Chomhairle Ealaíon, 1965.

Novels

• A Chelsea Householder (1882). (3 volumes), London: Sampson. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882; New York: Holt, 1883.
• A Millionaire's Cousin. London: Macmillan, 1885; New York: Holt, 1885.
• Hurrish: A study. (2 volumes), Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1886; London & New York: Macmillan, 1887; Belfast: Appletree, 2007. Volume I, Volume II
• Major Lawrence FLS (1887). (3 volumes), London: John Murray, 1887; New York: Holt, 1887. Volume I, Volume II, Volume III
• With Essex in Ireland: Being extracts from a diary kept in Ireland during the year 1599 by Mr. Henry Harvey, sometime secretary of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex. London: Smith, Elder, 1890; New York: Lovell, 1890; London: Methuen, 1892; New York: Garland, 1979.
• Grania: The story of an island. London: Smith, Elder, 1892
  • (with introduction by Robert Lee Wolff). New York: Garland, 1979.
• Maelcho: A sixteenth century narrative. London: Smith, Elder, 1894; New York: Appleton, 1894.
• A Colonel of the Empire: From the private papers of Mangan O'Driscoll, late of the imperial service of Austria and knight of the military order of the Maria Theresa. New York: Appleton, 1895.
• The Race of Castlebar: Being a narrative addressed by Mr. John Bunbury to his brother, Mr. Theodore Bunbury, attached to his Britannic Majesty's embassy at Florence, October 1798, and now first given to the world (with Shan Bullock). London: John Murray, 1913.

Short fiction

• Plain Frances Mowbray, and other tales. London: John Murray, 1889.

Non-fiction

• Ireland (with Mrs. Arthur Bronson). London: T.F. Unwin, 1885; New York: Putnam, 1887.
  • also published as The Story of Ireland. London: T.F. Unwin, 1889
  • expanded as Ireland: With chapters on the Irish Free State (with additional chapters by Michael MacDonagh). London: T.F. Unwin, 1923.
• Traits and Confidences. London: Methuen, 1898; New York: Garland, 1979.
• A Garden Diary: September 1899 - September 1900. London: Methuen, 1901.
• Maria Edgeworth. London & New York: Macmillan (English Men of Letters), 1904; New York: Macmillan, 1905.
• The Point of View: Some talks and disputations. Suffolk, UK: privately published, printed by Richard Clay, 1909.

Juvenile

• The Book of Gilly: Four months out of a life. London: Smith Elder, 1906.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

Fontenoy by Emily Lawless-1

• List of Irish poets

References

• Patrick Maume & Frances Clarke, "Lawless, Emily," Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009. Web, Aug. 27, 2022.
• Michael O'Flynn, "Troublesome Subjects: History, nature and gender in the Irish writings of Emily Lawless". D.Phil thesis, University of Sussex, 2005, British Library.

Fonds

A collection of her papers (mostly newspaper cuttings of reviews, containing little correspondence and no literary manuscripts), was deposited in Marsh's Library, Dublin, by her brother, the 5th (and last) Lord Cloncurry (1847–1929).

External links

Poems

• "Fontenoy (1745)" in A Book of Women's Verse
• Lawless in The English Poets: An anthology: "After Aughrim," "Dirge of the Munster Forest, 1581," "Fontenoy, 1745: I. Before the Battle; night," "Fontenoy, 1745: II. After the Battle; early dawn, Clare coast"
• Emily Lawless at PoemHunter (3 poems)
• Emily Lawless: Her most famous poems at Ardclough Community Council

Books

• Works by Emily Lawless at Project Gutenberg
• Emily Lawless at the Online Books Page
• Emily Lawless at Amazon.com

About

• Emily Lawless in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• Emily Lawless at Victorian Secrets
• Emily Lawless at Ricorso

This article incorporates text from the Dictionary of Irish Biography, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 4.0 International license. Original article is at: Lawless, Emily