Several days earlier, we had stopped at Strokestown Park in County Roscommon for a visit to the Irish National Famine Museum, where I was able to visit with John O’Driscoll, the General Manager. The museum is sobering in itself, now housed on the grounds of the former estate of Denis Mahon, a landlord assassinated during the famine years. The terrible facts about the famine are displayed in Strokestown, but my conversation with Mr. O’Driscoll confirmed something that had lurked in my mind since I had begun my research for the novel.
The Great Famine is often relegated to the dustbin of history. It’s not extensively discussed in Irish schools. Young people know it happened, but their lesson on it might be a page or two in a textbook. In fact, discussion of this almost incomprehensible disaster has been so late in coming that the famine museum didn’t officially open until 1997, 152 years after history tells us the blight began.
The Irish suffered for three reasons during the Great Famine: pain, shame, and truth. Pain from their losses and shame for not being able to stop the famine’s natural course by any means, either through scientific or governmental remedies. The truth of the matter was that the suffering population could do little about the famine through its own efforts. Planning to avert a disaster really didn’t enter the minds of the starving. They reacted as best they could. I liken it to modern-day preparations for a nuclear war. Few of us construct fallout shelters, hoard supplies, and plan for a postnuclear apocalypse. Mostly we understand that there is little we can do in the face of such a horrific and devastating occurrence.
One might think that writing a fictional account of the famine would be an easy task. Take a natural disaster, throw in pain and suffering, and somehow get your heroine to survive. But the famine is a difficult beast to conquer. The laissez-faire politics of the time, though seemingly simple, led to complex debates and crippling governmental standoffs in England and Ireland. Landlord, agent, and tenant relationships were byzantine and codified but were, in their own way, haphazardly circumvented by the growing Irish population. The laws of ownership, conacre, rent, and farming collided with the nascent methods of the industrial revolution. The life that made Ireland’s population swell prior to the famine, thanks to the nutritional benefits of the potato (the average adult ate ten to fourteen pounds a day; yes, you read that correctly), was diminishing cataclysmically under new and unforeseen circumstances. Ireland would be irreparably altered by the famine, including a devastating population loss that hasn’t recovered its mid-1840s number to this day.
According to most sources, nearly 1 million people died, possibly more, and an equal number emigrated from Ireland, with huge numbers leaving for the United States and for neighboring England and Wales. Most of those affected were poor and from the most densely populated Irish-speaking districts in the west, where death or emigration were common. Thus, the Irish language and other cultural aspects endemic to the region were diminished by this disaster. These people with little education, no money, with an overarching reliance on the potato, had no escape plans, no manner of removing themselves from the disaster other than through starvation or emigration.
Another of the sobering moments I experienced came when I fully realized the famine’s immense devastation. The famine pots used to serve soup still exist on the grounds of Westport House as a silent reminder of efforts to save a starving population. The outlines of the potato ridges that failed the people during those years still line the County Mayo hills. How can an author accurately portray the horror of that time without overwhelming the reader? It’s a tough task. Page after page of misery and gloom would swamp all but the most dedicated. But, in reality, poverty, death, and misery were what the Irish suffered. What little hope there was came in the form of friends, neighbors, and relatives looking for a miracle in their struggle to survive.
I chose to set the book in Carrowteige, a lovely village on the northwest coast of Ireland because I wanted a certain “romance” for the novel emboldened by a wild Atlantic setting. Lear House is, of course, fictional. However, the setting around it, as portrayed in the novel, is not. Because the Irish landscape changes from county to county and the crops and farming methods differ by location, I have taken some fictional liberties with those aspects. Despite that fact, I have attempted to be honest about The Great Hunger, drawing not only from history but the lives of my characters. Authors sometimes take criticism from readers for ratcheting up the stakes to what appears to be “no way” or “that couldn’t possibly happen” moments, within a fictional context, but that’s what drama is about. Briana Walsh and her family are subjected to dire circumstances, but I’ve included nothing in The Irishman’s Daughter that I felt was out of the realm of possibility. As always in my historical fiction, I’ve attempted to meld tragedy with hope.
Many thanks go out to Evan Marshall, my agent; John Scognamiglio, my editor at Kensington, for his steadfast vision; and my readers, Bob Pinsky, Michael Grenier, Heidi Cote, and Lloyd A. Meeker. Special thanks go to John O’Driscoll of Strokestown Park House and the Irish Heritage Trust, and Treasa Ní Ghearraigh of “the old school” in Carrowteige for her valuable historical and environmental insights regarding most everything about Carrowteige and County Mayo. Also of invaluable assistance were my manuscript editors, Traci Hall and Christopher Hawke of CommunityAuthors.com. Their combined efforts made this book possible.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
THE IRISHMAN’S DAUGHTER
V. S. Alexander
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included
to enhance your group’s reading of
V. S. Alexander’s The Irishman’s Daughter!
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. The book starts in County Mayo, Ireland, in September 1845, as the famine reaches northwest Ireland. The Irish farmers had no idea what was going on. What would your reaction have been to the failed crop?
2. The average adult ate ten to fourteen pounds of potatoes a day before the famine. Could you have lived on that diet, and, if so, what meals would you have prepared?
3. Briana and Lucinda have different views of the world. Which one appeals to you most?
4. Rory and Briana were what we might call “childhood sweethearts.” Do you believe that such relationships exist and that they can last?
5. Life before the famine would have offered a rural Irish family limited forms of entertainment—fairs, gossip, fights, horse racing, and books, for those who could read. How would you have filled your time in such a setting?
6. The English government during the famine adopted a laissez-faire (hands off) economic policy toward the Irish. How do you think the political climate affected the outcome of the famine?
7. It’s been said that Irish families, both abroad and at home, said little about the famine after it diminished in 1852. Why do you think the people were so silent?
8. Who do you think killed the Kilbanes?
9. In America, Lucinda meets Dr. Scott. What do you think happens to her and the doctor?
10. Briana takes her daughter back to Ireland. Do you think that was a wise decision considering the famine was still raging?
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