Abstract
Memoir has always been a popular genre of nonfiction, and often a useful source for social historians. Within memoir there is also a strand of writing that seems to self-consciously tie together the historical and personal. Recent examples include Remembering Peasants (2024) by Patrick Joyce and A Thread of Violence (2023) by Mark O’Connell. The former is a historical study of peasants alongside elements of memoir while the latter is a personal account of the process of researching a historical homicide and the context in which it occurred. A similar journalistic style was adopted by Kate Brown in her history of the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, Manual for Survival (2019). Brown shares the research process, with all its meanders and obstacles, alongside her findings. Barbara Taylor chose to combine a history of asylums in Britain with her memoir of living with depression, The Last Asylum (2014). These kinds of narratives can remind us that history is written by people following their interests; it is not the unearthing of fossilised truths.
This review will examine two examples of the form that are of particular interest to readers of this journal: Missing Persons: or, My Grandmother's Secrets by Clair Wills and Hereafter: the Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara by Vona Groarke. In very different ways, each of these books grapples with subjects that are central to the current wave of social history in Ireland: migration, institutionalisation, gender roles, the family, sexuality, shame.
Clair Wills, a professor of English Literature, has written a number of works of social and cultural history which have been characterised by readability. Missing Persons sees Wills direct her attention to the history of her own family, in particular the impact of an unwanted pregnancy in her mother's generation. Vona Groarke, a poet, has constructed an experimental text combining memoir, poetry, historical research and fiction. In Hereafter she traces her great grandmother (Ellen O’Hara) who migrated to America in 1882 before returning to Ireland later in life.
Both works draw welcome attention to the historical process and its discontents. Records are lacking, memories are imperfect, ordinary people go missing from the archive. There is something particularly revealing about the authors’ frustrations in trying to pin down the essence of people in their own family pasts that is a welcome reminder to all historians. Both writers often ask themselves what we can understand about any other person, their emotional lives, their reasons for making choices: these remain opaque and almost unknowable perhaps even to the person themself. Groarke imagines her ancestor in the corner of the room with her, occasionally scoffing at her attempts to pin her life to paper. Wills searches for clues in her mother's stories, measuring them against information she can find in official records.
Both books are also interesting in the way that ideas of motherhood have shaped their understanding of history. Wills pictures history as ‘a long line of bodies, stretching back through time […] But my figures are all women, heavy with child’ (p. 3). Groarke considers how imagining her ancestor in the past mirrors the way that mothers imagine and conjure their future offspring. ‘I think maybe you have imagined me’, she writes of her grandmother, ‘Of course you did. And every mother after you in my family line. I was conjured into being by women whose bodies stated an extraordinary (but also a simple) fact, as mine did with my own son and daughter’ (p. 139).
The books are each, in their own way a case for microhistory. Missing Persons examines many aspects of twentieth-century Ireland through the lens of a single family, not just the experience of an unwanted pregnancy and of the mother and baby homes. We see also the decline of the small farm and the struggles of rural Ireland, declining marriage rates and mass emigration. Likewise, Hereafter uses Ellen O’Hara as a window on the experience of so many other women: ‘From her life I conjure parallel lives, a whole way of going on’, as Groarke puts it (p. 141). The allure of the microhistory is exactly the mixture of the personal and the universal, the pull of a single narrative that can illuminate other lives.
As Groarke attempts to conjure her ancestor from ledger books and newspaper clippings she provides an excellent lesson in the constructed nature of historical narrative. Examining her desire to fictionalise her great-grandmother, to picture her clothes and her shopping habits, her desires and her moods, Groarke writes: ‘Fancy, every word of it./I could just stick to the facts./Which facts?’ (p. 121).
Which facts, indeed. The choice of what trails to follow, who to research, which materials to read and which to ignore is the choice of every historian (indeed every researcher). Yet the final work, between its hard covers and stamped with the imprimatur of a university press, gives an impression of completeness and wholeness. We spend years trying to persuade undergraduate history students that history is constructed of choices and arguments. They often leave convinced of ‘bias’ and no more enlightened. This should be a set text for history education: the reader is enjoyably pulled along on the research journey and can watch as Groarke takes the pieces from the archive and tries to put them together into the shape of a person. In lean, lyrical prose Groarke demonstrates that historical narratives are made rather than discovered. Groarke's text is extensively annotated and there is a fulsome bibliography. There is value here for the researcher of the Irish diaspora, not just for those of us interested in the philosophy of history.
Groarke's great-grandmother is neither missing nor forgotten by her family. By contrast, Wills grapples with a cousin that she knew of but never knew. Mary, child of her uncle and a local woman of whom her grandmother did not approve, was born in Bessborough mother and baby home. She later committed suicide when pregnant perhaps, Wills speculates, not wishing to rehearse the experience of her own mother. Digging up this past casts members of her family in an uncomfortable light: here they are, the ‘society’ of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission. The people who shamed, blamed, looked away are Wills's grandmother and uncle and arguably Wills's own mother. Whether or not they agreed, no one stopped her grandmother from exiling her son and condemning his lover and child, her own grandchild, to the horrors of Bessborough. This sequence of events was not discussed, but for Wills ‘we were all living in the aftermath of a series of catastrophic decisions, whether we knew it or not’ (p.14).
Wills does not blame ‘society’ for the damage wreaked by the mother and baby homes. She searches through official records, conversations with relatives and personal memories to try to understand what anyone could have been thinking. Why did this happen? No matter how much the government and the church are responsible ‘A whole society learnt not to look, or not to look too closely, and certainly not to ask too many questions’ (p. 20).
Missing Persons is certainly an argument for the widespread impact of the culture that created and sustained the institutions. I admit to a slight squeamishness about what sometimes feels like a claim to victimhood. Wills is aware of this and is sensitive to the memory of the people who have been most harmed: the uncle's lover (Lily) and her daughter Mary. Mary has no one else to tell her story: her mother and father are both dead and she has no children. There is a sense in which the telling of these kinds of stories helps to reduce stigma and shame. There is no doubt that a certain kind of secrecy has caused incredible damage. And yet telling the story lays a kind of claim to it that feels somehow uncomfortable.
In Hereafter Groarke also tries to grapple with difficult choices made by her ancestors. Ellen, after nineteen years in America, returned to Sligo to leave her two young children to be raised by relatives. She had been perhaps widowed or perhaps abandoned by the father of the children. Twelve years later, having not seen them, she brought them back to New York where they settled and grew into adulthood. When family fortunes turned in Sligo, though, Ellen's daughter returned to Ireland with her husband and child and left Ellen behind. So many painful calculations, so many family relationships strained by financial necessities. Both Groarke and Wills try to get inside the heads of these past people, to understand why they did what they did. It's hard to separate what's known in the present, though. Groarke knows that Ellen will never see her daughter or granddaughter again. Wills knows that Mary will commit suicide.
This brings me to a striking contrast between the books. Hereafter is almost obsessively documented. For all its forays into fiction and poetry it is stuffed with references to literature and images of archival documents. Wills has chosen, by contrast, not to cite any authors. Yes, occasionally one is acknowledged in the text (Catherine Corless, for example, and the Report of the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes). I would not expect footnotes in a book like this. However, I found the absence of even a short bibliographic essay to be strange. In the chapters where she reconstructs her grandmother's young life, for example, it is clear that she is relying a wide range of existing literature. At one point, she writes ‘The trouble with all this “background” is that it takes the place of the foreground. I see my grandparents disappearing under the weight of an established set of stories’ (p. 117). The established narratives of the War of Independence in County Cork might be so familiar to many readers as to require no annotation. However, a few pages later she writes ‘One study estimates that in 84 per cent of cases of infanticide in the late nineteenth century the infants were illegitimate’ (p. 123). We are never told the author of the study (Elaine Farrell, perhaps). A further reading section at the end of the book would have allowed Wills to acknowledge that work which she has used to such excellent effect and to provide readers with places to go if they had further interest.
Wills and Groarke both struggle with the reluctance of their ancestors to give themselves up to investigation, the difficulty of understanding decisions taken decades and even centuries ago. Wills reaches the conclusion that forms of secrecy and reticence were necessary in twentieth-century Ireland, almost a social lubricant. She finds reasons to forgive her grandmother for what she did. Groarke also wants to patch things up between past and present: ‘I am sorry that your life was hard, grateful that you did what you could’ (p.175).
In conclusion, both of these books are a pleasure to read. They are thought-provoking and engaging and would offer an excellent starting point for conversations in academic spaces and outside. I would strongly encourage you to read them.