In the 1860s in Dublin a libel case took place in the courts that must have entertained as much as it shocked. It involved the Wildes of Merrion Square: Jane, otherwise known by her pen name, Speranza, and her husband, William, the noted surgeon and writer. They were, of course, the parents of Oscar Wilde, although at this time he was only a boy and years from his own, more famous prosecution.
In the earlier case Jane Wilde was sued by a young woman called Mary Travers. Travers, who was assisting Dr Wilde in his literary work, claimed that, in a letter Jane had written to her father, Robert Travers, Mary’s character and chastity had been impugned. Jane agreed that she had written the letter, but only in an attempt to put a stop to the harassment and public insults she and the other Wildes had been subjected to by an out-of-control Travers. In the end, after Dr Wilde’s already bad reputation as a seducer was further impaired, and Travers’s standing wrecked, she won her case. And got a farthing in damages. It was no victory.
The Wildes are famous. But who was Travers? And how did, or could, a genteel young woman survive such exposure? Eibhear Walshe, in this impressive and strangely affecting novel, imagines and seeks to explain her. We find Travers as a middle-aged spinster living with her sister Emily in Mitchelstown, at Kingston College, “a pompous name for what is really a set of almshouses for deserving and impoverished Protestant gentlefolk”.
The Travers sisters have to dissimulate, as Emily is still a papist. (Mary converted to Protestantism in her rebellious youth.) And whether Mary might be considered deserving if the countess by whose grace and favour they survive, Anna Kingston, should learn of her past is doubtful.
In the mild bleakness of Mitchelstown their life is necessarily secluded. Emily gardens and husbands while Mary is occupied as custodian of the castle’s library. She’s an excellent librarian, but she sees little wrong in purloining a copy of William Wilde’s book that he inscribed for the countess and writing her own name in it.
It is 1895 and the trial of Oscar Wilde in London for a crime of immorality, its nature frustratingly hidden in euphemisms, is filling the newspapers. It recalls for Mary her past embroilment with the Wildes and the resulting scandal, which ruined her family and led to her Mitchelstown retirement. By now she is a would-be writer who hopes to compete with Speranza. She confides to a diary her memories and musings on the dramatic events of that time and how they have brought about her sequestration with the incompatible Emily in a quiet country town.
These summer months in which Mary writes her diary are unusual for the Travers sisters. Emily arranges a trip to Cork, where she looks after their monetary affairs while Mary searches the newspapers for every scrap of information about Oscar’s case. Then Emily falls ill, takes to her bed and instructs the impractical Mary on the intricacies of their finances. These are more favourable than Mary had thought, and she decides to go to London to support Jane Wilde in her maternal distress.
The delusion that Jane might be grateful for the concern of a woman who dragged her and her husband through the courts is one of Mary’s many delusions. This doesn’t matter, though, because when she turns up at her dingy lodgings, poor Speranza, aged and anguished, is beyond support, more interested in Mary’s offering of a plum cake than anything else.
These real personages are all very satisfactorily imagined. Apart from Speranza/Jane, there’s Oscar’s drink-sodden brother, Willie, and the tragic Wilde girls of Co Monaghan, known as the Marmosets, William’s natural children, famous for their immolation when their crinolines caught fire at a ball. Travers had met them when she went to Co Monaghan with William to consolidate their relations. And, of course, there’s the doctor himself, monkeyish, indulgent, tender and exploitative.
As she wanders alone through London and haunts the British Museum reading room, researching her case and describing her past actions with a strident frankness, Travers can be baffling. She has no feminine guile, no gift for self-deception. When she writes of her seduction of Wilde – she says it was she who made the running – she sounds like a man, even a modern man. The temptation might be to doubt Walshe’s ability to inhabit a female character. But in fact she is credible because she writes so straight and so true.
She was once, we finally realise, and as she realises herself, mad, bad and dangerous to know, even though she has devoted her life since to the appearance of decorum.
This novel has many qualities, but as a study of a lonely struggle to achieve dominion over madness it’s remarkable.
