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Two new books about the runaway slave who became Lord Edward FitzGerald’s servant

Laura McKenna has written a historical fiction book on the same topic as Neil Jordan’s

A portrait of Tony Small, commissioned by Edward FitzGerald and painted by Thomas Roberts in 1786

Edel Coffey's face
Edel Coffey
Sat Feb 20 2021 - 06:00

This month Lilliput Press publishes The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small by Neil Jordan while across the Liffey New Island has just published Words to Shape My Name by newcomer Laura McKenna. Both novels fictionalise the story of a real-life historical figure Tony Small. Small was the servant of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a progressive Irish aristocrat who renounced his privileges to fight for Irish independence in the 1798 rebellion.

Whatever about turning up to a wedding in the same outfit as somebody else, discovering you have just written the same novel as someone else must rank right up there as a debut author’s worst nightmare. You spend years researching, writing and crafting your novel, only to find another author has been doing the very same thing. And not just any other author, but a highly respected, experienced author who also happens to be an Oscar-winning film director. It’s enough to make anyone weep into their manuscript.

It’s not the first time this has happened. In 2004, Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author, both novelised versions of Henry James’ life, were published just months apart. Tóibín’s book was shortlisted for the Booker and went on to win the then Impac Award, while Lodge went on to write another book – The Year of Henry James – in response to the whole experience.

It’s easy to see why the story of Tony Small caught the attention of Jordan and McKenna, not only because of the extraordinary personal friendship between Small and Fitzgerald, but also because it is a rare gift of a story that incorporates the American war of independence, the French revolution, the Irish Rebellion of 1798, issues of race, identity, independence, class, and the burgeoning Irish theatre scene.

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Small was Fitzgerald’s right-hand man for almost two decades. He first encountered Fitzgerald on the battlefield of Eutaw Springs in 1781, during the American revolution. Small was a runaway slave at the time, and nursed Fitzgerald back to health. Fitzgerald was so grateful, he procured a letter of freedom for Small from the king and hired him as his groomsman and personal assistant.

Several perspectives

Words to Shape My Name takes the slightly convoluted but satisfying form of being told through several perspectives. The story begins with Tony Small’s daughter Harriet receiving her father’s personal papers, 50 years after his death. McKenna uses these papers to tell Small’s story in his own voice, and through his authorised biography of Fitzgerald, which he had been commissioned to write by Fitzgerald’s sister, Lady Lucy.

The different perspectives are a clever addition, adding the benefit of hindsight from Harriet along with some information on how race and gender issues have moved on 50 years later. Lady Lucy’s marginalia, meanwhile, provide some light relief with her censorious editorial notes and desire to rewrite history.

The Capture of Lord Edward Fitzgerald for High Treason. Image: Hulton Archive/Getty

McKenna makes some grander points here about who gets to write history. It’s not just the victors. If the losers have enough money and privilege, they too get authorship. If the bystanders and partakers are lucky enough to be able to read and write, they can write their personal histories through diaries and letters.

A frequent problem with historical fiction is a lack of suspense – we generally know how things turn out. But McKenna has cleverly added tension by withholding the details of a bequest from Lady Lucy to Harriet until the final chapters.

Words to Shape My Name began life as part of McKenna’s PhD in creative writing from University College Cork, and there is a slight aftertaste of academia in her commitment to describing some experiences in arduous detail while glossing over more traditionally novelistic elements, such as the love affair between Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Sheridan.

Jordan’s skill

Neil Jordan doesn’t miss the same opportunity. His skill as a visual storyteller can be felt from the first page of this novel, and he wears his research lightly, galloping along with great drama and humanity, carefully selecting what to include and, crucially, what to leave out.

He never shies from the juicy stuff – Elizabeth Sheridan, the lover that Lady Lucy vetoes in McKenna’s book, is brought to full life here, and her tragic affair with Fitzgerald is fully explored. Another character, Molly, a kitchenmaid turned costume maker, becomes a friend and supporter of Tony Small throughout the book, teaching him to read and helping him when he is in need. She is a fantastically realised character who serves to bring to vibrant life the ordinary working-class person’s experience of the rebellion.

These books are not so much about Tony Small as about his extraordinary relationship with Fitzgerald, but our impression of Small from both books is consistent: a loyal friend with an enormous sense of justice, a man who, having been abused and exploited, fought against these things where he found them. He is an unreliable narrator, however, when it comes to the Fitzgeralds. He loves them unconditionally and would die for Edward, but the reader gets the impression that they never truly see him as more than their servant.

Jordan is a writer of uncommon talent, particularly around pacing and visual description. It’s easy to forget his literary credentials, which have been somewhat overshadowed by his film career, but his first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979, and he has won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Irish Pen Award, and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award twice. He has said that his sole ambition was to be a writer of books but films came calling.

Jordan has described The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small as “an outsider’s perspective on 18th-century Dublin and on the Irish struggle against empire”, and the novel resonates with a contemporary modern Irish experience of race, identity and belonging, class and distinction, home and elsewhere.

In Words to Shape My Name, Laura McKenna tells her story vividly and with great imagination and in doing so she has achieved an extremely accomplished debut. Unfortunately for her, Neil Jordan has done all that too, but with added cinematic pace and irresistible lyrical beauty.