Valentine’s Day 2025 marked the centenary of the birth of the late Irish writer and poet Val Mulkerns, a significant figure in Irish literature who played an important role in literary, academic and public life of 1950s Ireland. To celebrate this anniversary, 451 Editions has released a new edition of A Time Outworn, which includes an excellent and moving foreword by Carlo Gébler.
This was Mulkerns’s debut novel, and it provides a fascinating view of the country after the second World War and pertinent issues of the time, including partition and the revival of the Irish language: “I thought of Ireland symbolically, as a girl in tears by the ruins of a round tower, with a bloody slaughtered wolfhound at her feet.”
The narrator, Maeve Cusack, is a spirited, outspoken 18-year-old who we meet as she moves out of her Dublin home to start a job in Tipperary, far away from Diarmuid, the boy she loves, and into the unknown, navigating the heightened emotions and crushing disappointments of teenage years: “I felt suddenly and desperately alone, for the first time. Everything that was familiar and comforting seemed to pass away with the last swaying lighted carriage. The carriage which my family and Diarmuid had watched passing out of Kingsbridge.”
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While A Time Outworn reads very much like a first novel and carries the heavy undertones of autobiography (towards its close the author daringly admits that we have been reading a memoir all along), what sets this beautiful book apart and makes it such a pleasure to read are Mulkerns’s wonderful powers of observation, her vivid descriptions of landscape and her darkly astute depictions of character: “he began to make love, with a conventional tired air, a joyless search for something he would never find, because he had forgotten what it was”.
Val Mulkerns wrote nine more books, becoming a highly respected voice in Irish literature and one of the first elected members of Aosdána. She died in 2018 at the grand age of 93.
With prose that is often melodic, the mood throughout melancholy, A Time Outworn is the sort of novel that makes you nostalgic for a past you’ve never had but you miss all the same.
