James Joyce Quarterly

This impressively comprehensive survey of autobiographical prose writing in Ireland—the first such history to date—opens and concludes with discussions of utterances in Latin. "Ego Patricius" ("I am Patrick") is the first sentence of the Confessio of the patron saint of Ireland, who brought Christianity to the country in the fifth century (as Máire Ní Mhonaigh details in an essay on medieval first-person writing—23).¹ In 2013, the poet Seamus Heaney's final text message to his wife Marie before his sudden death in a hospital in Dublin—"Noli temere" ("Be not afraid")—was mentioned during his funeral by his son Michael. In her contribution on "Irish Life-Writing in the Digital Era," Clare Lynch reports that these words were subsequently shared many thousands of times on social media (386-87). She comments that even the viral afterlife of Heaney's message is linked to "a core assumption of Irish autobiography, that individual lives are never fully separated from the communal story of the nation" (387).

The editor Liam Harte provides an intelligently argued introduction to the critical history of this genre and to the collection of engaging essays that he has assembled here. Inevitably, most attention is given to writing in English over the last two centuries or so. Given that many Irish autobiographers are inclined to link the individual life with the oppressed or emerging nation, it is unsurprising that works by political rebels including Wolfe Tone, John Mitchel, and John [End Page 193] O'Leary are alluded to repeatedly. In Irish literary history, the autobiographies of leading writers associated with the Irish Literary Revival are usually regarded as especially significant. Indeed, Harte asserts that W. B. Yeats is the most studied Irish autobiographer (3). Nicholas Allen discusses the memoirs of Yeats and some of his contemporaries in his essay on "Autobiography and the Irish Literary Revival"; he also analyzes George Moore's three-volume Hail and Farewell as a mischievous, flamboyant work that attempts to portray an entire society in the midst of upheaval and transition (152-55).² The account offered here bears out Eamonn Hughes's suggestion that revivalist autobiography can usefully be read as a series of meditations on Ireland and Irishness (152).³ This volume also encompasses essays on life-writing and oral history in the Irish language, including the celebrated Gaeltacht autobiographies from western, Irish-speaking regions of the country.⁴ Other contributions include studies of Irish Protestant autobiography and of writing from the Irish diasporas in Britain, the United States, South America, and Australia. The voices of those, especially from the late twentieth century onwards, who might regard themselves as victims rather than avatars of the nation, are generously represented—including members of the urban underclass and women or children abused in Catholic-run institutions with the connivance of the independent state. In general, Irish women may have found it difficult to attain the confidence to narrate their own life histories in the sustained, authoritative style associated with the classic forms of autobiography. In one of several contributions that considers the question of gender, Margaret O'Callaghan (in an essay on "Women's Political Autobiography in Independent Ireland") usefully brings together an eclectic range of texts. Among these are reminiscences by women activists of the revolutionary generation, works by politically engaged nationalist women (including Fanny Parnell, the more radical sister of the Irish Parliamentary Party leader, and Yeats's beloved Maud Gonne), and some key examples of Irish feminist confessions such as Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by journalist and broadcaster Nuala O'Faolain.⁵ Elsewhere, Matthew Kelly wryly notes that while Gonne was central to Yeats's telling of his own story, it is striking that the poet was quite a marginal figure in her autobiography, A Servant of the Queen (112-13).⁶

It is impossible to do justice to the range and interest of this material here. So, what might a study...