Biography: The title of this work is a little problematical. As Jane Jordan hastens to make clear in her introduction, Katharine O'Shea was never known personally as "Kitty": this was a derisive term applied to her chiefly on Irish platforms in the Parnell split of 1890-1.
TM Healy at Edgeworthstown in January 1891 made a little rhyme:
CS Parnell MP
Care of Kitty O'Shea
Down at Brighton by the sea.
The relationship between Parnell and Katharine was not in any normal sense of the term "an Irish affair". It was conducted in its entirety in the south of England, and Katharine never came to Ireland. When Parnell after their marriage expressed his wish to bring her to Ireland, Healy's response was especially ferocious.
The name "Katharine Parnell", it is true, never gained much currency. Katharine Woods married at Brighton on January 23rd, 1867, William Henry O'Shea, then a cornet in the 18th hussars, the son of a Limerick-born solicitor and a Catholic. She did not cease to be his wife until the conditional decree of divorce granted to WH O'Shea was made absolute after the expiration of the prescribed period of six months. It was the grant of the conditional decree on November 17th, 1890 that set in train the fall of Parnell and the bitter schism in the Irish parliamentary party. Katharine was married to Parnell for 14 weeks between their marriage in the registry office in Steyning, near Brighton, and his death on October 6th, 1891.
Katharine published her own two-volume memoir, Charles Stewart Parnell, His Love Story and Political Life under the name Katharine O'Shea, with that of "Mrs. Charles Stewart Parnell" in parentheses and smaller type underneath. This reflects no doubt the requirements of her publishers as well as the influence of her unpleasant and importunate son by the Captain, Gerard. Joyce Marlow in the biography of Katharine she published in 1975 struck a serviceable compromise in giving it the title: The Uncrowned King of Ireland: The Life of "Kitty O'Shea".
It is not an easy life to recount. Katharine became socially reclusive after Parnell's death. The telling of the story of her life is overwhelmingly based on her memoir. Joyce Marlow covered much of the ground, but Jane Jordan contrives to add something to the tale.
Jordan publishes a photograph of Assheton Clare Bowyer-Lane Maunsell, who was Parnell's grandson and the end of his direct line of descent. He died in India in 1934 at the age of 24, serving as an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers. The resemblance to Parnell is less marked than in the case of his mother, Clare, Parnell's third and second surviving daughter by Katharine.
(Jordan also cites an assertion of Fr John Maunsell, the son of Clare's widower, Bertram Maunsell, by his second marriage, to the effect that Katharine was at the time of Parnell's death pregnant and subsequently suffered a late miscarriage.)
One might have wished for rather more consideration of Katharine's memoir as a narrative rather than as a mere repository of information. Very little is known of the process of composition, and it has sometimes been suggested that the memoir was largely ghost-written. While it is entirely a matter of subjective opinion, to me this does not ring true. She was certainly writing under definite and identifiable constraints, but once one adjusts for these there remains a compelling account of her relationship with, and a persuasive characterisation of, Parnell.
If one wanted to be austere, there is an occasional touch of Emma Bovary to the prose: but it is hardly sensible to expect an actor in such a drama to give an account of it in measured Gibbonian prose.
Her memoir, breaking 25 years silence, created muted consternation among Parnell's surviving lieutenants (only Healy professed to read "with complete satisfaction" the announcement of "Kitty's great work"), and affronted nationalists of the more piously patriotic type.
Katharine's book was lastingly to alter the perception of Parnell, and did much to engender the extraordinary literary resurgence of the Parnell myth. In the case of Yeats, this was principally through the medium of Henry Harrison, whose Parnell Vindicated (1931) drew on his conversations with Katharine after Parnell's death. Joyce, in a complex gesture which combined a recognition of the romantic literariness of her memoir, and a tacit, half-private, Parnellite hommage, subsumed fragments of her account of her early life in Molly Bloom's soliloquy in Ulysses.
Katharine was on any reckoning a remarkable woman, who, as Jordan rightly points out, was systematically portrayed (by no means exclusively by anti-Parnellites) as domineering and meddlesome. The death of Parnell left her devastated and friendless, isolated even from her own siblings who had sanctimoniously (and self-interestedly) colluded with WH O'Shea. Further blows to her health and finances ensued. Under tremendous pressure, she was capable of acting erratically. At one of her early meetings with Henry Harrison, the young Parnellite MP who rallied to her aid, she produced a revolver ("competently cocked and loaded"), told him she had information he was a spy, and demanded that he confess.
Four days before Katharine's death on February 5th, 1921, her steadfast daughter by O'Shea, Norah, wrote to Henry Harrison that Katharine was slowly and painfully dying: "She has the happy delusion that Parnell comes to her at night, when things are worst, and draws her 'out of the black waves' . . . Her periods of delusion have always been Parnell, Parnell, Parnell".
Frank Callanan edited The Literary and Historical Society 1955 - 2005, published earlier this year. He is at present working on a book on the politics of James Joyce
Kitty O'Shea: An Irish Affair By Jane Jordan Sutton Publishing, 278pp. €20