Irish Studies: Cesca's Diaryis a fascinating account of the life of a young woman in early 20th-century Ireland who not only witnessed but also took part in some of the cataclysmic events during the revolutionary years from 1913-1916.
Frances Georgiana Chenevix Trench was born on February 3rd, 1891, in Liverpool, into a unionist clerical family. After the death of her father in 1900, her mother, Isabella, was left to bring up five children on her own on a limited income. One of the consequences of having to depend on a wider family network for support was that her children were to spend a considerable amount of time staying with cousins in Ireland.
While in Ireland, Frances, who was known as "Cesca", got caught up in the zeitgeist of the Irish Revival and from the age of 15 became intensely interested in Irish literature, nationalist politics and the Irish language. In fact Cesca's enthusiasm for Irish revivalism seems to have discomfited her younger cousin, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen. In her autobiography Bowen recalls her cousin's penchant for wearing flamboyant Celtic robes of scarlet or green, and being somewhat embarrassed by her conspicuous Irishness.
Another famous cousin, Samuel Trench, also known as Diarmuid Trínseach, whetted Cesca's passion for the Irish language. Diarmuid joined the Gaelic Society while a student at Oxford and became a fluent speaker, teaching others enthusiastically. A little too enthusiastically, in the view of James Joyce, who grudgingly put up with him as Oliver Gogarty's guest in the Martello Tower in Sandycove. Joyce would later send up his Oxford-inflected revivalism wonderfully in the portrait of the character Haines in Ulysses.
As Cesca herself became more immersed in the language movement, she took the name Sadhbh Trínseach and spent some time in Aran and Achill practising her spoken Irish and developing her skills as an artist. All the while she found herself in sympathy with the ideals of advanced nationalism as espoused in newspapers like Sinn Féin and the Gaelic League's An Claidheamh Soluis.
The centrepiece of this book is the presentation of Cesca's diaries between the years 1913-1916. These were variously written in English, Irish and French and often in a poor hand on bad quality paper. Hilary Pyle is to be congratulated for her painstaking work in retrieving these accounts and making them available to the general reader for the first time. The diary entries are expertly contextualised by Pyle's astute interpolations and are amplified by judicious footnoting along the way.
In these pages we are provided with wonderful first-hand accounts of the early years of Cumman na mBan (of which Cesca was a member), the Howth gunrunning and the events of Easter Week 1916.
The beauty of a diary account like this is that it returns the reader to the complexities of a moment when an intoxicating mix of ideas, philosophies, ideologies and movements were competing for ascendancy while Europe was at war and political consensus had broken down in Ireland. This contrasts interestingly with retrospective historical narratives that tend to deliver the past in the form of an inevitable sequence of clear-cut events.
Notwithstanding her interest in contemporary politics, Cesca's greatest legacy may be her creative input into the development of Irish design. Having benefited greatly from time spent taking classes at various workshops and studios in Paris from 1913-14, she contributed in many important ways to nationalist visual culture during this crucial period for Irish design. Her significant interventions include a series of posters and greeting cards for the Gaelic League, several fashion illustrations and political cartoons for An Claidheamh Soluis and a number of illustrations for books by Pádraic Ó Conaire and Douglas Hyde. Her drawings and sketches are liberally reproduced here along with a selection of her more important oil paintings and portraits of her by other artists.
This book will be a valuable addition to the bookshelves of those concerned with the history and development of modern Irish art. It will also appeal to general readers with an interest in women's history and the Irish independence movement.
Cesca's Diary 1913-1916: Where Art and Nationalism MeetBy Hilary Pyle The Woodfield Press, 305pp. €45
PJ Mathews lectures in Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin. He is the author of Revival: The Abbey Theatre, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement(Field Day/Cork UP, 2003)