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  • Chapter 8 - The Ecology of the Irish Big House, 1900–1950

  • Edited by Malcolm Sen, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
  • Book:
    A History of Irish Literature and the Environment
    Published online:
    14 July 2022
    Print publication:
    28 July 2022, pp 173-189

  • Summary

    Built infrastructure, housing, land management etc., are historically conjoined to the legacy of Anglo-Irish big houses. These prominent questions also need to be viewed in relation to ecological imperialism. By 1870, as Kelly Sullivan reminds us in this chapter, there were at least 4,000 big-house estates all over Ireland. In later decades many of these estates fell into disrepair or were razed to the ground by financially strapped owners. In addition, the “violent destruction of close to three hundred big houses during the War of Independence and Civil War (1919–23)” and the repurposing of the remaining houses as “schools, prisons, hospitals, and other institutions [such as] hotels, museums, and tourist sites, or as small privately owned farms,” point to their centrality in Irish geographical, political, and cultural landscapes. However, Kelly argues that although “Big House novels … have undergone a reassessment, with scholars no longer reading them as elegies for an extinct way of life, they are yet to be viewed from an environmental perspective.”