The lives of the gentry

The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House, by Vera Kreilkamp Syracuse University Press, 289pp, £35.95

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The persistence of fiction about the life of the Anglo-Irish gentry has above all elicited two divergent responses. Some believe that Big House novels emerged, following the publication of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent in 1800, from a nostalgic pleasure in the survival of older forms. As the Big House died as a social actuality, it was reborn in Irish literature, transfigured as a symbol of order and culture, a stage setting for an image of cohesion. Others, in particular nationalist critics in Ireland, condemn the whole genre as reactionary.

As Vera Kreilkamp rightly argues, both of these responses misread a complex and ambivalent phenomenon that is, generally, neither elegiac, nor nostalgic, nor reactionary. Thus, for instance, the first view is invalidated by the fact that in the majority of novels, the Big House is anything but a symbol of order, culture, unity, cohesion; the building is, more often than not, shown in a state of decay, signifying family breakdown and the decline of the ascendancy class, the irresponsibility of an uprooted or alienated landlord being experienced by the exploited tenants as a loss of security and permanence in their lives.

The country estates in Irish fiction are usually depicted in periods of acute historical crisis for Anglo-Irish society. Many Big House novels, especially those written in the 20th century, make the point that the ever-receding ideal of the cultivated Big House at the centre of an organic community is based on false interpretations of the past. The class of gentry is portrayed as propelling itself into oblivion through greed, improvidence, and historical myopia - common failings of colonists who cannot, or will not, apprehend their exploitative role.

Castle Rackrent and the later Irish novels of Maria Edgeworth, such as Ennui, The Absentee and Ormond, are the first texts to be scrutinised, and quite appropriately so, for it was in these books, above all in Castle Rackrent, that Edgeworth established the central characteristics of a literary tradition that still survives today. Whereas Castle Rackrent focuses on the demise of the gentry and its replacement by aspiring members of a burgeoning middle class, Ennui and the other later works deal with regeneration and re-education, concentrating mainly on how irresponsible landlords undergo a change for the better that is based on educational maxims promulgated by Maria's father, a change that betrays a strong moral didacticism on the author's part.

Edgeworth, Lever and Somerville, although occasionally invoking the nostalgic ideal of a semi-feudal relationship between ten ant and landlord, threw into relief, at times with savage irony, the inevitable decline of the Big House and the instability of their own society. Through their depictions of corrupt proprietors, the Gothic writers Maturin and Le Fanu expressed Protestants' guilt-ridden unconsciousness of their culture. Elizabeth Bowen, with the exception of The Last September, which adheres to the thematic pattern established by Edgeworth, Lever and others, turned to her ancestral home as an image of stability and permanence. Other 20th-century writers, such as Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnston, William Trevor, Aidan Higgins and John Banville, revised, reclaimed, re-invented, internationalised or subverted the form. What most Big House novels share is the fact that they relentlessly debunk Yeats's glorification of the Anglo-Irish tradition.

Interestingly, unlike at Strokes town Park House, where both Irelands are equally on display - the Big House and the cabin, Protestants and Catholics, ascendancy and peasant cultures, the conquerors and the dispossessed - the literary tradition of the Big House has largely failed to evoke the experience of the Catholic tenants. Even the most successful examples do not offer the double narrative necessary for telling the whole story.

To do full justice to a competent and rewarding study such as this is impossible within a short review. Suffice it to say that Vera Kreilkamp is admirably knowledgeable about the subject and the writers she discusses, providing competent and cogent analyses and charting the development of the Big House genre with great persuasive power. The book abounds in useful information. I even learned something strikingly new about myself: a footnote on page 207 informs me, to my considerable surprise, that my Christian name is actually "Rudolf". But what's in a name?