Memoir Bricks and Flowers— An Anglo-irish Memoir Katherine Everett (Somerville Press, £15)
IMMORTALISED BY an embarrassment of literary luminaries, the so-called ‘anglo-irish’ still, remarkably, evade capture. among the richest members of his eloquent caste, Jonathan swift noted a propensity to fill the libraries of their famously gracious and graciously doomed mansions with books ‘all about themselves’.
She embodied intelligence, adaptability and a fierce disdain for convention
Edith somerville (one half of the chimera behind those beloved ‘irish rm’ stories) praised them as ‘exponents of the art of being jolly in creditable circumstances’.
Elizabeth Bowen described them, herself included, as ‘living on the hyphen’ between two worlds.
This fascinating memoir, first published in 1949 and now attractively re-issued, exemplifies all these qualities— and more.
Katherine Everett (née herbert) was born at Cahernane house, Killarney, in 1872, just before ireland’s Land Wars and home rule movement fatally undermined the precarious privilege of her class. schooled in whist— played for bounty earned catching clothes moths—but little else, she fled a childhood drenched in maternal gloom, severe anglocatholicism, intricate snobberies and incessant rain for the warmer embrace of various relatives.
among them were Lady ina Ferrers, frustrated chatelaine of staunton harold, Leicestershire, and Lady Olive ardilaun, widow of sir arthur Guinness and second only to the Monarch in fortune. They encouraged a pragmatic creativity that led her from London’s slade school of art to a pioneering career as a housebuilder and garden designer.
Other encounters, including those with Wilde, Yeats, rodin and her comically mad aunt-cummother-in-law, aurelia, fostered alternative, singular strengths. From voyaging to australia—four months by barque—to extracting teeth and facing down sinn Fein gunmen, Everett embodied intelligence, adaptability and a fierce disdain for convention.
hers is the wittiest and most selfdefiningly eccentric account of anglo-irish talent, taste and sheer resistance to extinction i’ve read. it brings a vanished world alive. Caroline Jackson