Frances Flanagan’s monograph addresses a subject which has received comparatively little attention from historians. The book examines the revolutionary period and its aftermath through the lens of four largely neglected writers who, despite their proximity to advanced nationalism prior to 1916, became disillusioned with the revolution’s trajectory after the Easter Rising and increasingly critical of the orthodoxies of nationalist Ireland after 1922. Flanagan’s study is presented through the fictional and historical writings of Eimar O’Duffy, P. S. O’Hegarty, George Russell and Desmond Ryan. Given this study’s overt focus on dissenting voices in the Free State – and, indeed, the revolutionary period itself – Flanagan has made a suitable choice in selecting her four subjects. All four were intimately acquainted with the cultural-ferment of the ‘pre-revolution’ and the course of events leading to the foundation of the Free State in 1922: O’Hegarty as an I.R.B. man and Gaelic Leaguer; Ryan as a pupil of St Enda’s, disciple of Pádraig Pearse and veteran of the Easter Rising; O’Duffy as a former leader of the Irish Volunteers and Russell via Horace Plunkett’s co-operative movement, the ill-fated Irish Convention and as editor of the Irish Homestead. Furthermore, all four would remain influential writers during the 1920s and 1930s while O’Hegarty and O’Duffy also served the new state as civil servants.

In the introduction, Flanagan describes her subjects as writers who were ‘all members of the advanced nationalist movement prior to 1916 who came to reflect on the revolutionary years with ambivalence and regret’ (p. 3). Flanagan’s monograph is a study of the ways in which the myths of revolutionary Ireland, and the orthodoxies of the new state it engendered, were critiqued by intellectuals who had first-hand experience. It suggests, therefore, that the process of ‘revising’ the Irish revolution was not merely the domain of a later generation of professional, ‘revisionist’ historians dispassionately poring over the sources at a remove from this formative period in Irish history. The book reminds us that, even in its immediate aftermath, there was no stable consensus about the Irish revolution. For those who assumed political leadership of the new state, the goal of political independence was defined as the revolution’s over-arching aim. By analysing these four writers Flanagan shows that the progressive social and cultural impulses of the revolution became obscured.

Flanagan is methodical in the structure of the four chapters (chapters two to five) that deal with her chosen subjects. She positions each writer within his own biographic, cultural and intellectual context before expertly mining their published writings on the revolution. It is here that the book truly excels as the author succinctly, and with empathy, provides an intimate portrait of each man’s experience of this period of profound change. Flanagan shows how the four men memorialised the revolution and how their interpretation of it changed over time. It is apparent that the disillusionment of these four writers was multifaceted owing to their individual circumstances, allegiances and influences (p. 49). The discontent explored in the book is wide-ranging: from O’Hegarty’s disappointment that Arthur Griffith’s Sinn Féin was side-lined by the revolutionary movement’s militarist wing during the Anglo–Irish War, to Eimar O’Duffy’s disenchantment with capitalism itself.

Before coming to her individual portraits of the four writers, Flanagan looks more broadly at popular and official accounts of the revolution during the Free State period in an introductory chapter that provides context to their writing. Here a broad sweep of revolutionary writing is examined: official and semi-official accounts; autobiography; hagiography, the work of ‘orthodox’ figures such as Piaras Béaslaí and the outputs of ‘better known’ dissenting voices, Seán O’Casey, Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin and Liam O’Flaherty. This chapter suffers somewhat through a lack of engagement with recent scholarship on the post-1922 period. Ciara Meehan’s 2010 study, The Cosgrave party, and Jason Knirck’s 2014 monograph, Afterimage of the revolution, both contest the rather stilted, though familiar, trope of a rigidly conservative Free State that failed to match revolutionary aspirations while Donal P. Corcoran’s Freedom to achieve freedom (Dublin, 2013) elucidates the severe financial constraints under which successive governments operated due to the Civil War’s toxic legacy. Surely this must be factored into any discussion of disillusionment after 1922?

In addition, there is a sense in this introductory chapter – the clarification in the conclusion notwithstanding – that the ‘social peril’ risked by these four writers in articulating their dissent has been somewhat over-stated. Just how unwelcome were dissenting voices in the new Irish state, its homogenous nature notwithstanding, compared to other examples in Europe between the wars? To take one example, O’Hegarty’s well documented scepticism of the 1916–21 years did not constrain his own relations with successive governments. He remained close to the Cumann na nGaedheal establishment through the 1920s and when Fianna Fáil came to power in February 1932, he retained his senior position in the civil service. Neither his dissent, nor his pro-Treaty associations, curtailed his career under Fianna Fáil (p. 111).

Flanagan concludes strongly by contrasting the intimate ‘stories and impressions’ of her unorthodox writers with the dispassionate, ‘scientific’ methods of revisionist historians of a later generation. She is clear that, despite their deconstruction of revolutionary myths, her subjects are not ‘proto-revisionists’, and implies that their writing should be interpreted in its own terms rather than in reference to the historiographical debate about the nature of the Irish revolution. Here, Flanagan concedes that the ‘perils’ her subjects faced of ‘estrangement, gossip, allegations of being “traitors” were of course mild compared to their dissident counterparts in continental Europe at the time’ (p. 199). This is a key point and further exposition, with reference to dissent and censorship elsewhere in Europe, would have strengthened the book by giving us a sense of how the Free State compared. On balance, this is a thought provoking and original study based on rigorous interrogation of primary source material and a close analysis of a wide range of literary material. It makes a valuable contribution to the historiography.