Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 43.1 (2000) 155-157

Book Review

The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House

The wealth of recent scholarship on internal colonialism has taught us to forego a habit of using "imperialism" as a one-size-fits-all category, and to attend more closely to the local color of British imperial discourse in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. No body of writing better rewards such critical attention than the Anglo-Irish fiction of Maria Edgeworth, Charles Lever, and Edith Somerville, authors of the genre known as the Big House novel. Born with the publication of Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent in 1800, the very year of the Act of Union, the Big House novel captures the success--and failure--of Britain's attempt to assimilate Ireland, while maintaining a healthy distance from its Irish subjects. The Big House novel testifies, moreover, to a fundamental paradox of internal colonialism, namely that assimilation tends to intensify rather than eradicate divisions. Ireland after [End Page 155] Union was arguably a more fractious place than ever before, where English bureaucrats vied for power with the Protestant ascendancy and an incipient Catholic middle class.

Vera Kreilkamp's new study explains that if we are to understand this complicated milieu, we need to begin by considering the colony as it was imagined by the Anglo- Irish, that class of landlords who served as intermediaries between the English and the Irish. Though the importance of the aristocratic estate was supposed to ebb with Union and with subsequent efforts by the English to install an array of new ideological state apparatuses, throughout the uneven development of the nineteenth century the Big House continued to serve as a nerve center for Irish culture. Even as the Easter Rising of 1916 and literary modernism made Dublin the focus of anti-colonial writing, Big House fiction continued to thrive, suggesting that Irish identity remained bound up with the countryside and with the feudal relations of lord and peasant. Kreilkamp's survey reflects the longevity of the form. Beginning with writers such as Edgeworth, Lever, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Somerville and Ross, she follows the shifting fortunes of the Big House through the twentieth-century fictions of Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, William Trevor, and John Banville. "[Though] few of the[se] novelists succumb to the power of Yeats's vision of the Protestant nation as the spiritual inheritor of an ancient aristocratic society," Kreilkamp writes, they nevertheless invoke the Big House as a symbol of "a lost ideal and a failed cultural purpose--of social responsibility, enlightened landlordism, or personal dignity--that their historical role as conquerors and exploiters of a native population has denied them" (265, 68). In this way, they make Anglo-Irish ambivalence the defining element in the Irish colonial experience, despite the fact that the Act of Union and its two-hundred-year-long aftermath have seen the landlord class forced from its estates, and Big Houses sink into various states of disrepair.

Kreilkamp takes this paradox by the throat, describing how the Big House novel defines the "Anglo-Irish experience as doomed from the start," even as it lays the foundation for a long history of Anglo-Irish domination of Irish literature and culture (265). As she demonstrates, Castle Rackrent established the Big House form by producing a governing class always already in decline, occupying dilapidated strongholds of rotten wood and crumbling stone. Well off the beaten path, the estate of Castle Rackrent is bordered on one side by a "black swamp" and on the other by low shrubs passed off as trees: "May be they are what you call trees in Ireland, [one of the unfortunate brides to arrive at the house observes,] but they are not a yard high, are they?"(Castle Rackrent [Oxford, 1995] 27, 61). Inside, "the doors clap for want of the right locks, and the wind [blows] through the broken windows that the glazier never would come to mend [and...