Francis Stuart was born in April 1902 in Queensland, Australia, where his parents, both of whom had emigrated from Co Antrim, were sheep farmers. Within months of his birth, Stuart's father died in a psychiatric hospital and his mother returned to Ireland with her five children. Much of his schooling was in England. Later in life he remembered hearing of the Easter Rising while attending Rugby public school.
While at Trinity College Dublin he was taken to one of the literary evenings held by George Russell (A.E.) and was there introduced to Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne and the French politician Lucien Mil levoye. They married in 1920 when Francis Stuart was 18 years old and Iseult Gonne some years his senior, and had two children, Ian and Catherine. Although he became a Roman Catholic only in order to marry, Stuart said his new religion had a profound effect on him. Later, he was to write a pamphlet for the Catholic Truth Society.
Three years after his marriage, he became deeply involved in the Civil War, fighting against the Treaty. In a 1996 interview with The Irish Times, he recalled meeting Michael Collins, saying "He was not particularly handsome . . . although it appears he has now become so." Stuart was a prisoner in Portlaoise when he heard of Collins's death and shortly after his release, he published his first book, a collection of poems called We Have Kept the Faith. The book received an award from the Royal Irish Academy. In 1929, Stuart and his family moved to Laragh, Co Wicklow, and two years later he produced the first of 11 novels written during the 1930s. Many of these enjoyed critical acclaim, with Stuart being called an "Irish Dostoyevsky". During the same decade, he had two plays staged at the Abbey Theatre. April 1939 saw Francis Stuart accepting an invitation from the Deutsche Akademie to tour Germany lecturing and reading from his novels. While in Berlin, he was offered a lectureship in Irish and English literature at the city's university and decided to take the post, which led to his remaining in Germany during the second World War.
There he met Madeleine Meissner, who married him in 1954 after the death of Iseult Gonne. Following her death, he was to marry the artist Finola Graham in December 1987. The years spent in Germany were to preoccupy all observers of Francis Stuart for the rest of his life and to overshadow all consideration of his work. Speaking of this period to The Irish Times in 1996, he said: "It was exciting, it was terrifying. It was at the heart of history." At the time, he wrote scripts for William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, and then made personal broadcasts to Ireland.
In 1981, he said of these: "My whole feeling about the broadcasts was that I was entitled to say what I liked and that it was the only time in my life that I was going to get the chance to say publicly what I thought." However, in 1943 this privilege of speech was ended when the German authorities began to insist he make anti-communist broadcasts and he refused.
When the war ended, Francis Stuart was interned by the Allies for a year and he then spent some time in France before moving to London, where he remained until 1959. In the post-war years he continued to write, including two novels, The Pillar of Cloud and Redemption, both of which were published by the Jewish Victor Gollanz, a point often advanced by Stuart's supporters whenever he was accused of anti-semitism.
Such accusations were heard intermittently as each new Francis Stuart book appeared, but became much more eloquent in October 1996 when Aosdana elected the writer to Saoi, the highest position the institution can bestow. Even before the ceremony, a number of other writers such as Christabel Bielenberg - who had also lived in Berlin during the second World War - questioned whether Stuart should receive this honour. Further protests were heard a year later after Stuart, appearing in a Channel 4 television programme on the Limerick pogrom of 1904, said: "The Jew is the worm that got into the rose and sickened it." In the same broadcast, questioned about his times in Nazi Germany, he responded: "Je ne regrette rien."
In late November 1997 another member of Aosdana, Maire Mhac an tSaoi proposed Stuart should resign. At a meeting to discuss this issue, Stuart was defended by Anthony Cronin and Paul Durcan. The motion was defeated and Ms Mhac an tSaoi resigned.
Mr Stuart had not participated in the debate over his possible anti-semitism, but the following January, speaking on RTE television, he insisted he regretted the Holocaust, that he had not supported the Nazis and was "intensely sorry for the hurt I caused so many people by appearing to". Thereafter, he never spoke publicly of the matter again.