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BOOK REVIEW

Catherine Morris, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012. 342 pp. ISBN 978-1-84682-313-8, hb, $70

Reviewed by Heidi Hansson.

Histories of the Celtic Revival have usually placed the geographical center of the movement in Dublin and concentrated on prestigious literary achievements such as W. B. Yeats’s poetry or the Abbey Theater’s productions. More ephemeral activities like regional theater performances, magic lantern lectures, newspaper contributions and tableaux vivants are rarely given the attention they deserve, which has meant that important Revival work has gone unnoticed or, at least, been undervalued. Catherine Morris’s study, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival, performs the important task of relocating the activist, playwright, poet and editor Alice Milligan as a much more central figure within the movement by shifting the scholarly focus to Belfast and rural areas in the north of Ireland, and highlighting the role of newspaper journalism, street theater, and public commemorations for the Revival specifically and for Irish nationalism generally.

Morris provides a full picture of Milligan’s life and background, and places the biographical details in their historical and cultural contexts. Alice Milligan was born in 1866 as the third of thirteen children in a Methodist family in Omagh, Northern Ireland. The family’s Methodism meant that she had access to an exceptionally enlightened education for girls at the time, although her studies did not put her in contact with nationalism. She later said that she “learned nothing of Ireland” from her early education (27). In 1887, she co-wrote the travel book Glimpses of Erin with her father, and, like her utopian novel A Royal Democrat published in 1890, the book gives an example of a colonial attitude, painting a picture of Ireland as pastoral and backward. Significantly, Milligan did not mention her first two publications after 1890, when she had begun to rethink Ireland’s colonial history.

Morris gives a good sense of Milligan’s political awakening, without falling into the trap of projecting twenty-first-century perspectives onto the past. During a visit to Dublin in 1891, Milligan encountered the nationalist movement and “experienced a political epiphany” (29). After qualifying as a teacher later the same year she returned to Belfast, initially working as a teacher but increasingly engaged in cultural work. In 1894, she founded the Irish Women’s Association (IWA), perhaps partly as the result of a growing feminist consciousness. But, despite her realization that women were discriminated against both in society and politics, Milligan believed, like so many other nationalist women, that the national cause had to come first. Unlike Maud Gonne’s Inghinidhe na hÈireann in Dublin which was socialist, feminist and republican and which Milligan later joined, the goal of the IWA was primarily to provide a cultural platform for women rather than placing them at the forefront of the nationalist cause.

In 1895, Milligan co-edited the monthly journal the Northern Patriot with Anna Johnston (Ethna Carbery), which gave her the opportunity to give regional expression to her nationalist ideas. The two women left shortly afterward in 1896, however, to establish the cultural journal the Shan Van Vocht (“Poor Old Woman”) which ran until 1899. The Shan Van Vocht was a blend of literature, history and politics and included a substantial number of contributions by women. It became the expression of an increasingly feminist, nationalist voice and placed Belfast firmly on the map of the Cultural Revival.

Without overstating Milligan’s importance, Morris shows how she became an energizing force on the local as well as the national level in the decades leading up to Irish independence in 1922. It is clear that she thought of herself as a citizen of the Irish Republic long before it had come into being. She made significant contributions when it came to keeping the Irish language alive in the North, helping to establish Irish colleges, founding local branches of the Gaelic League and promoting Irish abroad. At the same time, she pleaded for a conception of Irish identity that included also non-Irish speakers. A particular challenge for her was the question of how to include Northern, Protestant women in the movement and ensure that the North was part of the national Revival project. Like many of her contemporaries, she sought inspiration in the Irish past for a liberated, democratic future, and given her view that the definition of Irishness had to be open, it is symptomatic that she was particularly interested in Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant arguing for the rights of the Catholic population. Wolfe Tone was one of the founders of the revolutionary organization the United Irishmen which, apart from rebelling against the English, attempted to forge unity between the different religious groups in Ireland in the 1790s. In the years leading up to 1898, Milligan played a vital role in organizing the centenary celebrations of the United Irishmen uprising in 1798.

Apart from these grand public commemorations, Milligan was instrumental in developing regional theater in the north of Ireland. She saw drama as both community production and community experience. Many of her plays, such as The Last Feast of the Fianna (1899)and The Daughter of Donagh (1903) were first published in newspapers, so that they would be available to nationalist theater groups at a low price. Through events like local theater performances and tableaux vivants, she managed to reach a much wider audience. Morris makes the suggestive point that the tableaux vivant form, in particular, allowed women from opposite ends of the political spectrum to work together on cultural projects. Since these shows were silent, the performances followed no script, which eliminated the need for fluency in English or Irish. Because the productions were collective efforts, the tableaux offered a liminal space of connection and opportunity where class and political boundaries were temporarily dissolved. As a result, they could help forge inclusive communities of women.

Milligan published in over sixty newspapers and journals throughout her active years. Her choice of publication venue was driven both by financial need and a desire to reach the wider community. Catherine Morris has conducted extensive archival research to gather these original materials, much of which has long been out of print. To provide a more complete picture of Milligan’s life and career, Morris has also collected the reminiscences of family and friends, photographs, diaries, letters, radio transcripts, and much more. In this, she has done a significant service to women’s history, especially since the bibliography’s careful documentation of the material makes it easily available to researchers interested in women’s cultural work, the wider contexts of the Irish Revival, early Irish nationalism or, indeed, Alice Milligan herself.

The book is well-edited, with illustrations and photographs that give an immediate sense of Milligan’s time and circumstances. The inevitable consequence of the mixture of overview chapters and in-depth treatment of particular activities is that the text suffers from some repetition, perhaps more than is strictly necessary. There are a few typographical errors and the mistake of attributing a work called Eblana to the writer and historian Emily Lawless when Eblana is instead the name used by the anonymous author of The Last Monarch of Tara mentioned on the same page (159). Nevertheless, the study is an impressive example of rigorous research and careful documentation, and offers a fresh approach to an often-researched period in Irish cultural history.

A welcome component is the extensive presentation of some of Milligan’s prose and drama, since the works are difficult to find. Morris, however, mainly discusses Milligan’s literary production from the point of view of its political and historical contexts, and does not offer much literary analysis. As a result, it is difficult to get a sense of the works’ literary merit. Milligan’s poetry, for example, is given surprisingly little attention. President de Valera awarded Milligan an Honorary Doctorate on behalf of the National University of Ireland in 1941, which suggests that her work was thought to have political value in the new Irish state, but explains little about their aesthetic qualities. On several occasions Morris connects Milligan’s work to that of her contemporaries, such as the dramatist and folklorist Augusta Gregory or the poet and artist George Russell (Æ), or to works by later writers and artists, like Brian Friel, Ken Loach and Eavan Boland. This strategy has the effect of showing that Milligan belongs to a long tradition of Irish literature but sometimes obscures the importance of her own writing. A greater engagement with the works as literature rather than as history would have added a valuable dimension to the study, especially since Milligan is remembered now mainly as a writer. But these minor limitations do not diminish the importance of Morris’s achievement. The book brilliantly demonstrates the value of a cultural studies approach for uncovering contributions to the Irish Revival that are given rare scholarly attention. It reintroduces the important and neglected Alice Milligan to the history of the period and provides new ways of understanding the varied manifestations of the Irish Cultural Revival.

Heidi Hansson is Professor of English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Her main research interest is women’s literature, and she has published in the fields of postmodern romance, nineteenth-century women’s cross-gendered writing, Irish women’s literature and Northern Studies. Among other things, she has written a full-length examination of the nineteenth-century writer Emily Lawless and edited collections on Irish nineteenth-century women’s writing and of cultural perceptions of the North. She is currently working on a study of literature connected to the Irish Land War.