Seeing our story anew, through heroic heroines
In ‘Through Her Eyes’, journalist and author Clodagh Finn ‘time-travels’ through Irish history to bring overlooked women back into the spotlight
WHAT if we asked a different question, I thought. Instead of examining what women weren’t allowed to do, I wondered what would happen if I asked what was possible in the lives of women in the long span of Irish history.
It was a fascinating journey that revealed so much more than I ever imagined. Time-travelling through the centuries, I ‘met’ women who led influential, active and important lives. There were — to misquote the old rhyme — thinkers, toilers, soldiers, sailors and much more besides. There were artists, power brokers, patrons and builders. Wives and mothers too, of course.
Too often, though, their stories remained under the radar, or incomplete. There might be a document or a letter here, or a signature on a charter there. But even those fragments — scant though they are — paint a picture of history that is peopled with far more women than you will find in conventional history books.
Why, for example, don’t we know more about the 6th Century female Cork saint Canir, who walked on water, or Macha, the woman who gave her name to Armagh, or Lady Ranelagh, the brilliant older sister of chemist Robert Boyle?
At least this year, you are likely to hear a lot more about Sr Concepta Lynch, the Dominican nun who, Michelangelo-like, hoisted herself on makeshift planks to paint the walls and ceilings of a little oratory built in 1919 to remember the former pupils who died in World War One.
By day, she taught art and music to the pupils at the Dominican Convent school in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, meticulously preparing her lesson plans on the back of jelly boxes.
When the school bell rang, she pinned her habit under an apron with safety pins and lay on a scaffold to turn a simple church into a magnificent example of Celtic Revival art.
For 16 years, she spent all of her spare time in the cold, lamp-lit chapel, breathing life into her exquisite Celtic designs with nothing more than ordinary household paint. She had to ask a fellow teacher to buy it as nuns were enclosed at that time.
In fact, the paint shop in Glasthule, Co Dublin, was delighted to receive Sr Concepta’s repeat orders because she wanted bright, vivid colours rather than the buff and green that were the big sellers in the Ireland of the 1920s.
She applied that intensely coloured paint to her enchanted birds, mythical animals and intricate interlace reminiscent of the earliest illuminated holy books. Her playful monks pulled each other’s beards as they had done in the Book of Kells, but Sr Concepta also incorporated many of her own designs.
She cut stencils from the blackout curtains so recently used in wartime and mapped out motifs of such striking originality that they are without parallel a century later.
The chapel has been open to the public for a number of years, but it is often described as a ‘hidden gem’. Let’s hope that the centenary celebrations of this “harmony of wonder”, as one visitor called it, will help this Celtic Revival treasure to finally come out of hiding.
For Jo Hiffernan, though, there are no planned commemorations.
Those who know the name tend to think of her as the belle Irlandaise; the beautiful Irishwoman who was American artist James McNeill Whistler’s lover, French realist painter Gustave Courbet’s mistress and the model for L’Origine du monde (the Origin of the World), Courbet’s 1866 realistic, graphic close-up of a woman’s genitals. But she did not pose for that painting — art experts are now 99 per cent certain of that — and you will be hard-pressed to find any documentary evidence of an affair with Courbet.
She might be remembered as a muse and model, but Hiffernan had an artistic ambition of her own. She painted and sketched and sold her work to art dealers under the name Mrs Abbott, although none of her work is known to have survived.
Her letters reveal a woman who knew the art world from many angles: as an artist, model and as an artists’ agent and manager. She sold Whistler’s paintings and when he went to Chile in 1866, he gave her power of attorney to manage his affairs.
She and Whistler parted ways after that — amicably it was said — but she remained a loyal friend. When he had a child with another woman, Jo and her sister Bridget Agnes raised it.
Another woman whose artistic contribution is poorly remembered is Clotilde Graves, the illustrator, journalist, playwright and bestselling author who was born in Buttevant, Co Cork, in 1863.
She was just 16 when she started working as a journalist on Fleet Street in London and quickly made her mark. One unnamed editor commented that she was an exceedingly clever young lady, an enthusiastic journalist and “quite one of us”.
It helped that she wore her hair short, dressed liked a man, smoked cigarettes and liked bicycling and fly-fishing.
English artist and cartoonist Leonard Raven-Hill even considered her to be the first female journalist on the famous newspaper street. “She had to do a man’s job in a man’s way, and in those days there were no ‘sob sisters’, lingerie chatterers, and the shrieking sisterhood hadn’t started then,” he said.
In a career that lasted nearly 50 years, she wrote 15 novels — including the bestseller The Dop Doctor — 20 plays, nine short story compilations and several thousand articles. Even though she was invalided in her fifties and spent the last 16 years of her life confined to a bath chair — a rickshaw-like wheelchair — she continued to write.
When she died in 1932, she was remembered as a brilliant writer who was Irish not only by birth but, to quote the Cork Examiner, because of “her gift of humour and sense of the ‘tears of things’”.
Her death was reported as far away as New Zealand. That country’s Evening Post noted that she had much of the talent of her relatives, the Irish family of Charles Larcom Graves, a journalist and travel writer, and Alfred Perceval Graves, who was a poet and the father of Robert Graves. She was also related to the Anglican Bishop of Limerick, Charles Graves.
Yet Clotilde Graves died impoverished and was almost forgotten, although as recently as 1971 she was still well-known enough to be a clue in the Irish Press crossword, which asked for her male pen name (Richard Dehan).
Five decades on, few remember this woman who could turn her hand to anything — illustration, art, acting, literary fiction, journalism and drama.
There are many others who suffered the same fate. And many more who did not enjoy success or recognition in their lifetime but deserve it now, even belatedly.
It’s not that women were written out of history, it is that they were too often never written in.
‘Women weren’t written out of history... they were often not written in’