9 - The Ocean of Truth: Atlantic Imagery in Emily Lawless’s Major Lawrence, F.L.S. (1885) and Grania: The Story of an Island (1892)

Summary

Emily Lawless (1845–1913) draws increasing attention from students of nineteenth-century Irish women's fiction, and Irish cultural history more generally, but much remains to be said about the preoccupations which drive and structure her work and how these reflected tensions and uncertainties of the British and Irish societies she inhabited. This chapter develops Heidi Hansson's argument that the tension between science and art in Lawless's work shows her ‘writing in the interspace’, revealing apparently fixed identities as illusory by-products of ceaseless fluidity (a very Darwinian concept, calling into question Christian and Aristotelean views of nature as possessing underlying fixed structures accessible to reason). It discusses Lawless's quandary between the anti-teleological world view of classical Darwinism and human search for meaning through science, art, love, and religion. It suggests Lawless's stories of Ireland share deep concerns with those set elsewhere, which are comparatively neglected. (Major Lawrence, F.L.S. is usually overlooked by critics, while the numerous readings of Grania show insufficient attention to the oceanic forces which dominate the novel's Inishmaan and the life of the heroine.)

Lawless was a landlord's daughter and sister (her father, the third Baron Cloncurry, was succeeded by two of her brothers) living through agrarian unrest, suspecting she was born too late for an imagined time when tenant– landlord relations were ‘naturally’ harmonious; she was a Unionist painfully aware of the violence of conquest and colonization, but convinced nationalism provided no coherent political alternative; a troubled agnostic haunted by Christian faith lost through Darwinism and refusal to accept that suicidal relatives were damned; a woman of ambiguous sexuality. Lawless was brought up near the Atlantic coast of Galway by her mother's relatives the Kirwans of Castlehacket, but spent her later years in Surrey, remarking that she left Atlantic waves to cultivate an English garden. A Garden Diary (1909) displays the garden as miniature replica of the natural world—both need rigorous pruning to forestall chaos—and as haunted by bloody struggles to maintain British power in China and South Africa; reflecting her position among ‘the mere irresponsible camp-followers of science’ contrasted with geniuses (‘Darwin played the tune … the rest of us … danced to his piping’) as reading narratives of scientific explorers (‘with the prince of them all one starts once more upon that immortal Voyage of the Beagle’)5 palely reflects the experiences of discovery.