LAST September I wrote about the Derry-born novelist Kathleen Coyle, who was born in 1883 and died in 1952 and whose work, though highly esteemed during her lifetime, had suffered from neglect since then. However, it was good to see an entry devoted to her in Robert Welch's 1996 Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, and it was good, too, to find that Wolfhound Press had taken up her cause by reissuing her 1930 novel, A Flock of Birds, as part of its classic Irish fiction series.
And now Wolfhound has just reprinted her 1943 memoir, The Magical Realm, an evocative, touching and beautifully written reminiscence of childhood in the city she left (for Liverpool and London) when she was 23. At the very start she obliquely mentions the accident that left her lame for the rest of her life - an accident that her daughter, Michelle Ripley, tells me had a profound effect on her future life.
It happened, Michelle says, because of the neglect of a nanny who had taken young Kathleen out for a walk, didn't notice that her foot had become entangled in the spokes of her baby brother's pram, and pushed the pram onwards, injuring the little girl. "The nurse then panicked," Michelle says, "not so much over the pain and injury to the child, but from fear of losing her job." She decided to keep it a secret, ordering young Kathleen to do so also.
This would be almost impossible to achieve in today's world of intimate families, "but in those days of infants being raised in nurseries, parents did not see that much of their children, and my mother recalled that when being taken down to her mother to say good morning and good night, the girl always carried her wrapped in a blanket so that her limbs were hidden". Eventually the injury was discovered (and the nanny sacked), but by then it was impossible to completely rectify the harm done, and Kathleen had to spend two years away from home under medical supervision.
Michelle has always regretted that her mother didn't see fit to explain the circumstances of the accident in her memoir: "I, as her daughter, feel strongly that the impact of all this trauma on her and the long periods of inactivity enforced on her - unable to engage in play with the other children or attend school with them resulted in her doing much reading from her father's good library, being forced to listen to adult conversation and to become observant and introspective. I feel that it did a lot to mould her into the person she became."
The Magical Realm sells at £8.99 in a handsome soft-cover edition and is well worth your time.
A gloriously sunny Bank Holiday weekend by the Nore provided the ideal occasion in which to re-read some essays by Hubert Butler, who loved that Kilkenny river so much and wrote so well about it and the surrounding countryside. It was also a fine setting in which to begin re-reading the most famous masterpiece of James Joyce, for whom another Irish river was so important.
Perhaps "re-reading" isn't the right term here - after all, the version of Ulysses I'm talking about, which is edited by Danis Rose and is due from both Picador and the Lilliput Press on Bloomsday, claims to be radically different from earlier editions in some significant respects.
Whether it is or not I'll happily leave to the standing army of Joycean academics throughout the world who, no doubt, will have a thing or three or seventy-seven to say about it. For myself, I'll content myself with saying that I found the editor's seventy-page introduction engrossing and that this reader's edition is on one important level, certainly that - in format and typography, it's a joy to peruse.
STAYING with Joyce a moment longer. l'd like to commend the Wolfhound Press reissue of James Joyce's Dublin Houses and Nora Barnacle's Galway, written by Vivien Igoe and first published by Mandarin in 1990.
I find myself constantly consulting Ms lgoe's A Literary Guide to Dublin published in 1994, and this Joyce book, which chronicles the decline in the family's status through the many houses they inhabited, is no less fascinating. My special interest in it comes from the fact that in 1976 I almost bought the fine house Joyce was born in at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar. Alas, the asking price of £16,000 was a thousand more than I could come up with at the time. Nowadays you wouldn't get a lean-to in Ballygobackwards for that price. Oh, I'd rather not think about it.