A ‘sort of Irish colony in London’ where men and women are united in their ‘belief in Ireland’ was how Tom Kettle M.P. introduced the gathering at the Irish Club in the heart of metropolitan London on Saturday, 12 December 1908.Footnote 1 The occasion: to celebrate the recent publication of a controversial history on medieval Ireland. Kettle went on to praise the author – the evening's guest of honour – a woman ‘who had found world-wide distinction in the purely intellectual domain’ and ‘thrown a new spirit into the writing of history’. That guest was Alice Stopford Green, whose monograph The making of Ireland and its undoing, 1200–1600 (London, 1908) had, since its launch on 16 June, provoked historians in England, Scotland and Ireland into a flurry of anxious indignation.
Stopford Green took to the floor after Kettle and released a mischievous attack on the historiographical tradition of Ireland, which she unequivocally denounced as ‘false’.Footnote 2 ‘I have heard that anyone who attempted to spread a knowledge of history was open to two forms of criticism – one, that it was an act of folly, and the other that it was an act of malice’, she began, without indicating where exactly she stood on any such spectrum. Claiming history as intrinsic to the evolution of human society and tracing it back somewhat fancifully to ‘aboriginal tribes of the tropical forests’, she proclaimed that Ireland had been denied an authentic and honest perspective on its own past, and her monograph was going to right that wrong.Footnote 3 To the great amusement of the assembled, she referred to the famous Victorian satire Erewhon: or, over the range (London, 1872) by Samuel Butler claiming Ireland as that ‘land where the Universities were colleges of unreason, where the chief business was the study of hypothetics, and where societies were founded for the suppression of useful knowledge and the complete obliteration of the past. (Laughter)’. The speech built up to a scornful rebuke of the old conventions of the ‘Englishman's history’ of Ireland and the legacy of the colonial educational system imposed by Archbishop Richard Whately. Despite her weaponised words, the lengthy reporting of the occasion and the verbatim publishing of her speech was supplemented by an effusive editorial comment in the Freeman's Journal claiming that Stopford Green had ‘slaughtered the enemies of sound learning’.Footnote 4
More than a century on from the events of that evening, Alice Stopford Green's work has been robustly disremembered within academic memory in both Britain and Ireland. Her history is seldom cited, and she is all but eradicated as a participant in Ireland's political struggle for independence. Both British and Irish historians have been ruthlessly dismissive of a woman who was widely regarded as one of the most celebrated public intellectuals of her day. She has been easily disregarded as a populariser of more sophisticated research into medieval Ireland, especially that of Eoin MacNeill. J. J. Lee's cutting criticism of Stopford Green's propensity to over-imagine – ‘one ship becomes a fleet, one scholar a university, one cow a land flowing with milk and honey’Footnote 5 – is not quite as harsh as her most formidable censor, R. F. Foster, who branded her as ‘resolutely unhistorical’, thereby stripping her of all academic credibility.Footnote 6
The recent stream of centenary analysis of the intellectual roots of the 1916 Rising dwelt briefly, if at all, on the historiography that shaped the mentalité of the revolutionary generation. Theatre and poetry, not history, were recognised as the determining influences in constructing the consciousness of national independence. However, it is posited here that the publication of The making of Ireland and its undoing – something of a phenomenon in its day – influenced public perception by claiming a lineage of struggle for Irish freedom and by stimulating a sense of connection to a much earlier Gaelic revival.Footnote 7 Stopford Green set out to break with traditional constructions of medieval Irish history, which were focused on the pax Normanica. As her Irish Club speech made clear, she wished unequivocally to challenge orthodoxies and stereotypes associated with a unionist position. Drawing on the new stock of national myths, she constructed a sense of the organic distinctiveness of the Irish people that consciously and strategically sought to mobilise a sense of nationality in anticipation of political independence. On another level, she conjured up injustices from the past to trigger hostility towards England and to expose the dominant and oppressive systems of colonial and unionist iterations of history that represented the Irish as a people permanently at war with themselves. Her history might be revisited as a meticulously planned strike for Irish nationalism intended to demystify the mystique of professional history writing at a moment of deepening political tensions.
The confident and confrontational tone adopted by Stopford Green and Kettle at the Irish Club that December night had been exacerbated by the decision of the Library Committee of the Royal Dublin Society to ban Stopford Green's book from its shelves. Such a dramatic act of censorship suggested that the committee thought of the work as dangerous, subversive or unreadable. On 17 December, Kettle raised the matter in the House of Commons. In a playful exchange with the chief secretary Augustine Birrell, Kettle wondered how the Library Committee had the right to ban this work – ‘acclaimed in the world of culture as the most important contribution to Irish history published in recent years’.Footnote 8 The controversy over Stopford Green's book catalysed deeper concerns about historical practice and how representations of Ireland had favoured a colonial perspective. Such concerns would magnify over the ensuing months.
With the publication of the work, Alice Stopford Green moved unequivocally from a soft-influencer behind the scenes onto the stage of Irish national discourse as a leading intellectual player. Her apprenticeship had been served during forty years in capacities as a researcher, public educator and author. Her six-year marriage (1877–83) to the social historian John Richard ‘Jack’ Green, whose A short history of the English people (London, 1874) remained in print for the next five decades, gave her a unique place at the high table of Oxbridge history.Footnote 9 Building on her husband's other connections within the world of Gladstonian liberalism, she befriended and was mentored by leading historians of that age: Lord Acton, E. A. Freeman, James Bryce, W. E. H. Lecky, Mandell Creighton, Frederick York Powell, Jean Jules Jusserand and Henri Pirenne were among them.Footnote 10
During her years of marriage, she was privy to the discussions between her husband, James Bryce and Macmillan & Co. about the setting up of a ‘Historical Review’. Green's bad health prevented the idea from taking root at that moment, but Doris Goldstein cites those early conversations as foundational to the appearance of the English Historical Review in 1886.Footnote 11 While various non-academic female historians were connected to Oxford and Cambridge Universities in these years, Stopford Green had the highest public profile. She was one of a few women, along with scholars such as A. M. F. Robinson, Ellen McArthur and Eleanor Lodge, who contributed articles or reviews to the E.H.R. in those early years. Some indication of her standing within academic circles might be measured from the comments by those who provided references for her unsuccessful application in 1884 to become mistress of Girton College, Cambridge.Footnote 12 Moreover, she is yet to be recognised for how her interaction with those advocating the professionalisation of history helped to pioneer opportunities and academic training for future generations of women historians, notably Eileen Power, Constantia Maxwell and Gertrude Bell.
After her husband's death, Stopford Green built on his legacy and carved out her own identity, publishing his works in a series of popular volumes.Footnote 13 She was commissioned by John Morley to write a biography of Henry the Second (London, 1888); her two-volume work on Town life in the fifteenth century (London, 1894), if a conscious continuation of her husband's interest in social history, was recognised as an important contribution to understanding civic development in England in the late middle ages. By 1900, Stopford Green operated within a remarkable group of interlinking networks that connected her into European cosmopolitan coteries as well as different circuits of cultural and political power throughout the British Empire. Around her dining room table in London, she regularly entertained ministers of state, leading literary and theatrical celebrities, senior legal luminaries and historians. Her home became a crossing place for those involved in African affairs, the politics of Irish home rule and Ireland's cultural revival. While developing as a historian, she had emerged as both a new woman and an intellectual activist developing close friendships with a group of engaged women with public profiles who were starting to challenge archaic, patriarchal systems. The list included Beatrice Webb, Elizabeth Robins, Mary Augusta Ward (Mrs Humphry Ward), Vernon Lee, Louise Creighton and Mary Kingsley.Footnote 14 She was the first woman to sit on the committee of the London Library and was elected a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1901. From 1902 to 1911 she sat on the Nobel Prize for Literature committee.Footnote 15
If the continuing success of her husband's history provided her with financial independence, Stopford Green combined this with influential cultural and social capital along an axis reaching between London, Dublin and Paris. Her presence was critical too in brokering an understanding of Ireland in England. Over the next four decades she busily mediated political and cultural exchange in a period of escalating tensions emerging as ‘an important intermediary between nationalist Ireland and British radical Liberalism’.Footnote 16 In locating her visibly within a genealogy of Irish women historians, Mary O'Dowd has placed Stopford Green's history in a ‘transition period between the popularising and auxiliary role of women historians of the nineteenth century and the more scholarly and central position of women historians in the academy in the early years of the twentieth century’.Footnote 17
Because Stopford Green's actions and interests intersected with imperial affairs, cultural politics and social reform, the relevance of her writing and her activism challenge a straightforward Irish-English paradigm. Her historical scholarship has attracted the attention of international scholars who have examined her broader intellectual relevance. Sandra Holton has analysed her history at the intersection of gender and nationality, and as a deliberate provocation to the ‘scientific’, professionalised and male-orientated discipline.Footnote 18 Acknowledging her influence on a new generation of women historians in Ireland, Nadia Smith has also placed her recovery of a vernacular Irish history within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women historians who sought to unearth a specifically Native American history.Footnote 19 Helen Kingstone has argued perceptively that Stopford Green was writing for a future time: her history could not be fully understood in her own age.Footnote 20 A general lack of acknowledgement in Ireland might be partly attributed to the underdevelopment of critical self-reflection within the Irish historical discipline, identified by Ian McBride:
Irish historians have been reluctant to shine the spotlight on the historical profession itself, whether as an intellectual force or a sociological phenomenon. There has been no systematic study of the ideological commitments and institutional pressures that have shaped Irish historiography even though a distinction between ‘history’ as an academic discipline and the ‘mythology’ attributed to the laity has been absolutely vital to the self-image of professional scholars.Footnote 21
That ‘self-image of professional scholars’ was deliberately challenged by Stopford Green's critique of an identifiable and dominant unionist historiography. Significant aspects of her argument have resonances in more contemporary controversies over truth claims to the Irish past. Rather than being summarily dismissed as ‘unhistorical’ and one whose history is too political for it to be valued, Stopford Green might be revisited and repositioned as a historical modernist, who consciously broke with tradition, defied chronology and reorientated the literary form as a means of building popular and intellectual empathy in preparation for political transformation.
I
1908, the year of the launch of The making of Ireland and its undoing, was a moment of burgeoning public debates and disagreements in and about Ireland. Lucy McDiarmid has considered how such controversies were adopted in the struggle for sites invested with symbolic power in the Irish cause.Footnote 22 Strategic subversion was in the air. It is evident, as McDiarmid shows, in the 1909 campaign by George Bernard Shaw and Lady Gregory to challenge British censorship of Shaw's play The shewing up of Blanco Posnet. Similarly, Michael O'Hickey's encounter with clerical authority during his campaign to make Irish a requirement for entrance into the new National University of Ireland shows how control of the discourse of nationality was not just borne out along a British-Irish axis. Major issues concerning cultural identity and practice were fought over in relatively small sites. Recognising them helps to explain the shifting cultural dynamic between the loci of power and nodes of resistance. There was also a very strong performative element to such encounters.
Between 1908 and 1912, Stopford Green published three books on Irish history and used them to platform numerous public lectures in which she confronted unionist historians and challenged traditional framings of Irish history. Her long experience in publishing made her conscious of what made books sell and how history feeds off polemic. Recognising the need to conjure controversy well in advance of the appearance of The making of Ireland and its undoing, she wrote to her publisher, Sir Frederick Macmillan, as she entered the proof-reading stage: ‘The point about this book is that it is not only historical but will be used politically, and that may give it a sale which would never attach to a historical book.’Footnote 23 In another letter, she claimed that the wealthy classes would only be interested in the book if it was considered ‘controversial against the Roman Catholics’, which her book certainly was not. She added: ‘The one chance to get this book sold to the upper classes is to get it read everywhere through Ireland and discussed by the people themselves; then it will be talked about.’Footnote 24
Stopford Green had her own strategic intentions as to what ‘political’ meant and how to maximise publicity and sales. In advance of the publication, she entered into a convoluted negotiation over the terms of the contract. By then she was well seasoned at negotiating book deals and was part of an established stable of writers attached to Macmillan & Co.Footnote 25 Alexander Macmillan, a founder of the publishing empire, was a friend, and his company had profited handsomely from the tens of thousands of books sold under the name of ‘John Richard Green’. The name was synonymous with popular social history and Macmillan & Co. had paid quite generous royalties to Stopford Green that provided her with a regular income and the independent means to maintain a central London lifestyle.
But Stopford Green had different ambitions for The making of Ireland and its undoing. She was determined that the book should be widely distributed among the Gaelic League – and a cheaper and affordable edition made available for those who could not pay the full price of 10s. from booksellers. Initially, she suggested having two distinct editions: one Irish and one English;Footnote 26 but she eventually persuaded Macmillan & Co. to accept a somewhat unorthodox deal that avoided contracts altogether: she would pay for the entire print bill and Macmillan & Co. would receive commission for distributing the volume through their channels. The book would remain her sole property.Footnote 27 Another compromise was made regarding the notes and appendices, which were cut out to ‘shorten the book by some fifty pages’.Footnote 28 She was also keen to make sure that the language aspects of the text were beyond reproach. She contacted the Celticist, R. I. Best, to read through the proofs and rigorously check the Irish.Footnote 29
Aesthetically, the book had a deliberately didactic feel. Generously laid out, the print-size was large, margins wide and the narrative signposted with clear headers at the top of each page describing the theme under discussion. Dates in the text were kept to a minimum and placed instead in the margin, thereby rendering a literary rather than historical impression. This allowed for the restrictive confines of chronology to be transcended and the divide between the academic and popular to be bridged. The typographer and printer, Emery Walker, a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts movement, drew a special frontispiece map of Ireland, divided into five, not four, provinces.
There was an initial print run of 2,500 copies of the first edition, and an agreement that the author could ask for ‘any number up to 500 copies for my own Irish sale, on thinner paper, [with] different binding’.Footnote 30 ‘For the Gaelic League’ was stamped on the hardcover at the base of the spine, where the publisher's name would normally appear. Small advertisements appeared in the advanced nationalist press asking anyone interested in purchasing a copy to send 4s. and whatever extra to cover the postage to Stopford Green's home address at 36 Grosvenor Road. Within a few weeks of the launch, she reported back to Macmillan & Co. that there had already been some uptake on the subsidised edition from members of the Gaelic League and that she had applications from country districts: ‘many have sent their cards of membership; many have written entirely in Irish; all have written from poor addresses; a good number have come from back streets of London’.Footnote 31
The making of Ireland and its undoing was intended to be a radical reimagining of the trade, social life and intellectual culture of medieval Ireland, and one that opposed, in no uncertain terms, the prevailing narrative of backwardness, violence and fragmentation. The underlying research question to the book was straightforward: what was the state of Ireland that Tudor England conquered with such ferocity? Was it a place of unrelenting savagery, as the traditional version maintained, or was it a place of both intellectual and commercial prosperity? The use of the word ‘undoing’ in the title hinted at the underlying challenge to the existing orthodoxy.Footnote 32 This was about the retrieval of the story of a functioning, indeed flourishing, Gaelic society thriving in the shadows of English government: ‘The fact is certain that beyond all tribal disputes and provincial struggles the Irish recognised their country to be comprehended in one Law, one Literature, one History, one proud tradition of civilization.’Footnote 33
Her broader argument was framed around a direct attack on the existing academic orthodoxy and the process of disremembering that she believed had obliterated a specifically popular Irish history. Her preface opened with a candid and confrontational statement: ‘Many reasons have prevented the writing of Irish history. The invading people effaced the monuments of a society they had determined to extirpate, and so effectively extinguished the memory of that civilization.’Footnote 34 In this critique of the management and use of memorialised space, Stopford Green identified the need to occupy the public sphere with the semiotics of an authentically Irish memory and acquire new sources of historical evidence independent of those generated by the usurping power. Such views have contemporary echoes in more recent analysis carried out by Guy Beiner into social memory and the idea of deep traditions of vernacular history that undergo a process of silencing and forgetting.Footnote 35 Stopford Green was interested in excavating a narrative of peace based on social cohesion and exposing how waves of English interference had interrupted the organic evolution of Irish civilisation.
Controversy apart, there was much that was innovative and inventive in her approach. Her intention was to summon a new type of historical reality, one less bound up with the political and constitutional, and replace it with insight into a ‘Gaelic experience’ that was social and industrial. In the most detailed analysis of the study, Nadia Smith has argued how Stopford Green ‘recreated the texture of everyday life by describing houses, clothing, and entertainments’, evoking an advanced and coherent Irish culture reaching south into Iberia and north into Scandinavia.Footnote 36 To achieve this perspective, she harnessed new Irish language scholarship to construct a unifying sense of nationality and resolutely orientated the subject of history towards an emancipatory end. Landscape, archaeology, folklore, poetry, translation, architecture and material culture became vital constituents of her wider body of evidence. She referenced various new sources: genealogies, annals, and the work of noted antiquarians and philologists – Whitley Stokes, Kuno Meyer, the translations of Douglas Hyde, and Standish Hayes O'Grady's Catalogue of Irish manuscripts in the British Museum. From 1903, Stopford Green had collaborated closely with Meyer in the founding of the School of Irish Learning to encourage a new generation of scholars to rediscover and translate Irish language sources.Footnote 37 In some respects, The making of Ireland and its undoing was a public flowering of that research and writing. She contextualised contemporary issues to do with both the co-operative and Arts and Crafts movements, and addressed the pressing concerns on questions of economics, land and the Irish language.
If the book noticeably pulsed with that dreamy sensuality of pre-Raphaelite idealism and the perfect rendering of the medieval world, the narrative had many points of similarity to the picturesque style that she had learned editing and revising the work of her late husband. Rich symbolism and metaphorical literary description won out over dry analytical source criticism. Much of the focus was on the fifteenth century, a somewhat obscure period, which Stopford Green argued was a moment of national reconstruction, endowed with the promise of development. That promise was then obliterated by the Tudor wars and the English government's task of making Ireland British.
Stopford Green divided the study into two halves. An initial section on ‘Trade and industries’ looked at the structure of Irish commerce and communication. She argued that Ireland was always integral to European trade and continental commerce. Ties of cooperation with France, Spain, Italy, the Low Countries and the Levant were all part of Ireland's wider world and she described a functioning, advanced and coherent society built on manufacturing, construction, law and medicine. In part II she examined ‘Education and learning’, and Ireland's intellectual history. This section described the long interaction between Irish learning and European erudition throughout the middle ages. Lists of Irish scholars at Oxford and Prague served to validate the deep interaction of this scholastic engagement. But both parts ended with chapters mapping the violent intrusion of Tudor rule which ripped asunder this recognisable world of a distinctly Irish civilisation.
One innovative, if ultimately divisive, line taken in the book was Stopford Green's somewhat simplified reading of class. Stopford Green suggested that there was much more collaboration and common ground between the Irish and the Norman inheritances than was generally recognised. Her reading suggested, too, that there was a link between the democratic standards of her own time and the communal spirit of Gaelic Ireland. Her view echoed ideas that had developed in late Victorian Britain of the connection between medieval guilds and the rise of the trade union movement.Footnote 38 But it was the question of land where the class difference was most clearly identified. The Irish land system was ‘regulated after the manner of a highly complicated and orderly society’ where tenants’ rights were guaranteed.Footnote 39 This was destroyed by a rapacious ‘scheme of “conquest”’ and war on Irish trade introduced by Henry VIII and finessed with the plantation system introduced under Mary and Elizabeth I.Footnote 40 She claimed that the ‘propertied classes evidently feared the Irish land system as expressing what might be called the Socialism of the time’.Footnote 41 The Tudor wars were motivated less by national security requirements and the need to pacify a wild and threatening frontier, and more by a strategy to capture valuable trade and subvert the links between Ireland and Europe.
In the final chapter Stopford Green considered the effacing of history and how the act of conquest had required the obliteration of that old world of learning through the destruction of books, the spreading of calumnies and the misrepresentation of the people as poor and barbaric. Here she identified a long tradition of contempt and animosity towards ‘the Irish people’ by successive English governments that might be cautiously considered as an embedded form of race hatred. Titled ‘The political myth and its effect’, Stopford Green engaged in a candid deconstruction of England's view of the Irish as ‘savage’:
The memory of their former civilization was deliberately blotted out as though it had never existed. Another story was given to the world – a picture gloomy and savage, and stained with every vice and folly. Circulated by adventurers and planters, renewed by English exploiters and Protestant fanatics, by historians and politicians and journalists, through sheer repetition it has passed as it were into the common creed of Englishmen.Footnote 42
She sought to demonstrate how a tradition of historical understanding had evolved to serve the purpose of the conquerors, writing how ‘Reports born of prejudice and ignorance, born even of downright panic, have been commonly accepted as the truth about Ireland.’Footnote 43 By identifying the psychological determinants of conquest and the undercurrents of political opportunism that had led to the acceptance of this hostile tradition, she condemned this overtly English prospect of medieval Ireland. Her argument amounted to an uninhibited attack on the central sources underlying unionist history and a denunciation of an account written for the benefit of the colonisers that ‘served the purposes of English princes’.Footnote 44 Such a negative representation of Ireland was intrinsic to the colonial mission. Her offensive did not shy away from further hostile attacks on Trinity College's J. P. Mahaffy, a spat which had started the previous year.Footnote 45
It is evident that the work was forthrightly targeted at those who were either emotionally or intellectually sympathetic with the movement for Irish home rule. By confronting critical contemporary concerns to do with both land tenure and the Irish language, her arguments were shaped for a readership actively engaged with Irish self-determination. The argument invoked a new and alternative framework of historical knowledge that was very knowingly projected to disrupt tradition. In a prescient end to The making of Ireland and its undoing, that forewarned, in some respects, the legacy issues of the twenty-first century, she spoke of ‘how dangerous and unprofitable a foundation for a lasting settlement is a false or perverted history’.Footnote 46 Her work more generally raised imperative questions about the practice of Irish historiography that would resonate across the century and would have significant implications in the vicious contests over the authentication of the Irish past over the longue durée. Leaving aside specific facts and arguments, Stopford Green's contribution is remarkable for how she drew attention to the very process of history writing and attempted to demystify it in terms of its claims to professional and scientific status.
II
Macmillan & Co. circulated the book widely to the press and the initial notices were generally favourable. One of the first reviews appeared in The Peasant and was signed ‘Eamon Curtis’, presumably Edmund Curtis, the young medievalist, destined to be the future Erasmus Smith's professor of modern history (1914–39) and Lecky professor of history (1939–43) at T.C.D. Under the title ‘The vindicating of a nation’, Curtis gave a highly informed and enthusiastic analysis of Stopford Green's innovative use of sources in this ‘scientific history’ written in a ‘graceful, restrained and majestic style’.Footnote 47 Writing in the Irish Homestead, George Russell (Æ) drew attention to the contemporary relevance of the work and how it spoke to the rural co-operative movement.Footnote 48 Likening the experience of reading the book to a person recovering their memory, he noted how the narrative filled a vital void separating the bardic history of Ireland – ‘the tales of gods, and the wars of giants, a superhuman, fabulous history, with epic heroes, Finn, Oscar, and Cuculain’ – from an appreciation of ‘the lives of common men … [and] their ways of life.’ Another voice of nationalist Ireland, D. P. Moran acclaimed the book for ‘new views’ and ‘fresh ideas’ blended with the ‘charm of ripe scholarship’.Footnote 49
The first significant English review appeared in the Manchester Guardian and was generally favourable. The reviewer pointed out the irreconcilable paradox at the heart of the division between English and Irish perspectives on Ireland: ‘Englishmen think of Ireland as an English province, a disloyal, distressful, obnoxious province; Irishmen think of it as a nation.’Footnote 50 On the 1 August, a less favourable review appeared in The Athenaeum which described the volume as ‘a history in name, a French pamphlet in nature’. By casting aspersions over her methodology and suggesting that this was little more than a radical partisan statement, the reviewer pointed out the lack of Quellenkritik, in other words a proper critical evaluation of sources. He (presumably) made his own position clear when commenting: ‘Recognising Mrs. Green's great ability and the great army of arguments put forth, we prefer to abide by the traditional view of the state of Ireland, which is corroborated by the testimony of Englishmen.’Footnote 51
The most ideologically supportive evaluation was forthcoming from James Connolly.Footnote 52 In a review printed on the front page of The Harp, the mouthpiece of the Irish Socialist Federation, Connolly was effusive in his praise for the book and unhesitant in his support for how historical agency was projected back onto a newly remembered past and fused with the struggle of a proto-socialist people engaged in a conflict against colonial authority. He identified a central tenet of the argument – one with clear Marxist antecedents – that Ireland's problems extended from English interference in the country rather than the internal problems caused by internecine violence. He was impressed by Stopford Green's condemnation of Tudor England's ruthless and violent economic invasion of the country. He praised the book as a ‘wonderfully complete and systematic piece of historical architecture’ that broke with all the ‘conventionally established standards’ and applied ‘modern historical methods to the elucidation of Irish history’. He used the review to undertake a critical Marxist reading recognising the emancipatory potential that situated medieval Ireland ‘outside the pale’ as democratic and communal rather than feudal and aristocratic. He reinforced, too, the contention of the logical requirement by the colonial rulers to eradicate understanding of this violent rupture in the development of a Gaelic civilisation. David Lloyd has argued how, ‘an intrinsic element of Connolly's analysis of colonial capitalism in Ireland … sees colonization and the destruction of the Gaelic world as inseparable from the emergence in Ireland of capitalism’.Footnote 53 In the light of Lloyd's comments, part of Connolly's analysis might be attributed to his Marxist interpretation of The making of Ireland and its undoing. He wrote the review as he brought his study Labour in Irish history (Dublin, 1910) to a conclusion and much of his assessment was reworked into a lengthy ‘Foreword’ to that work.Footnote 54
Conscious of the power of her extensive network of contacts, Stopford Green circulated The making of Ireland and its undoing to raise a different level of awareness and influence. Various friends raised noise about the book with reviews and letters of support to the Freeman's Journal and local newspapers.Footnote 55 Quoting Stopford Green to make her case, Mary Hayden, later appointed as the first professor of modern Irish history at U.C.D., wrote articles for The Sphere between August and September that attacked ‘the writing of Irish history for British consumption’.Footnote 56 Another ally, Eoin MacNeill, presented a lecture to the St Patrick's Branch of the Gaelic League in Ringsend, where he proclaimed that ‘the book should be introduced into every school in Ireland’, and advised that if it were banned then teachers should read it and impart the essential messages to their class.Footnote 57 Stopford Green pushed the book out to the uttermost corners of the country. Letters of support appeared in local newspapers.Footnote 58 Her ideas were also taken up in the discussion of a new economics. On 21 December the National Literary Society hosted a lecture on the woollen industry presided over by T. W. Russell M.P. and delivered by C. H. Oldham. Oldham made a long complimentary reference to the book, which had dealt in detail with the importance of the wool trade for Ireland's economic relationship with Europe.Footnote 59
Presentation copies were despatched as Stopford Green locked in her wide network of influential and powerful friends. In June 1908 she sent a copy of the preface to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, saying that the book would reach him the following week.Footnote 60 ‘I have not met a single educated man in Europe, historian or otherwise’, she commented sarcastically, ‘who does not know that Ireland was savage till the good Elizabeth, at the least possible cost of men and blood, gently lifted it into the ranks of civilized peoples.’Footnote 61 She followed up this letter with another note sent from Tuscany in early August, claiming the book ‘has been like a surprise in the night to the enemy. A political attack they would have been prepared for, but not this bit of constructive work on the side they never dreamed of.’Footnote 62 In a letter to Winston Churchill dated 12 September 1908, the day of his marriage to Clementine Hozier, Stopford Green, at the suggestion of Hozier's grandmother, Blanche, countess of Airlie, sent Churchill a copy of the book, saying: ‘I begin to hope that it has ended the old conventional history of Ireland, and that a new study of it must now begin.’Footnote 63 The statesman and historian, James Bryce, who had served as chief secretary for Ireland from 1905 to 1907, wrote a letter of congratulations from Washington, where he was British ambassador: ‘It strikes me as the most remarkable collection of evidence from a vast number of authorities put together into the most concise form.’Footnote 64 Bryce's friend and France's ambassador in Washington, Jean Jules Jusserand, wrote how the book had proved an admirable companion during a train journey he had just made to New York. His main criticism was ‘your bibliographical indications are of such cryptographic nature’.Footnote 65 The U.S. newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst's legendary newspaper editor, Arthur Brisbane, told her that his review would reach a large audience: ‘I am glad to know that I shall be able to tell two or three millions of Americans about the book you have written and its value.’Footnote 66 A copy was sent to Theodore Roosevelt and in the covering letter Stopford Green adopted a positive line on contemporary British imperialism in Africa contrasting it to an administration in Ireland ‘inspired by indifference, contempt and boredom’.Footnote 67 The historian G. M. Trevelyan wrote to say that the work ‘starts a new epoch in the historiography of Ireland’.Footnote 68 But her critics were biding their time.
At the start of 1909 there was a drawing in of the ranks followed by a formidable counterblast of critical responses to the book. The January editions of the Quarterly Review, the Scottish Historical Review, the English Historical Review, the American Historical Review and the Celtic Review all ran comprehensive critiques; each one was from a well-known and recognised academic or scholar – and all of them men. The most thoroughgoing assessment came from Robert Dunlop, a Scottish historian of mainly seventeenth-century Ireland, known for his many contributions to the Dictionary of National Biography and the chapters on Ireland in the Cambridge modern history. Dunlop's essay was titled ‘Truth and fiction in Irish history’ and ran to over twenty pages. He surveyed four books in all, although three-quarters of the review focused on a robust rebuttal of ‘Mrs Green's book’.Footnote 69
While Dunlop admitted that no one ‘can read the history of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without a feeling of shame and sorrow’, he felt that the destruction of the clan system was a ‘necessary step towards the establishment of a higher and more developed form of national life’.Footnote 70 Over the centuries, England's policy towards Ireland was dictated primarily by self-preservation. He attacked Stopford Green at the foundations of her reasoning claiming that she had manipulated facts, ignored key sources and used other ones in ways which could be dismissed as ‘fantastic exaggeration’. Her ‘chief defect’ was an ‘inability to distinguish between the relative importance of her authorities’.Footnote 71 He dismissed her work as fanciful fiction, with arguments based on slender truths. The focus of his criticism was aimed at the view that medieval Ireland had developed an internal commercial cohesion. He was critical, too, of her terminology and use of language. What precisely did she mean by the term ‘nation’? Could her idea of a gradual assimilation of Celts, Danes and Anglo-Normans into an Irish ‘race’ stand up to scrutiny? He derided as a fiction her view that Celtic ‘civilisation’ had absorbed the cultural and racial intrusions of the previous centuries by the fifteenth century. The English maintained their difference and if assimilation did take place, then it should be understood ‘as a process of decay, and of a relapse from civilisation to quasi-barbarism’.Footnote 72 In a final scathing rebuke, he wrote: ‘We deeply regret that Mrs Green has written this book. No doubt it will secure her a certain popularity in circles where history is treated as the slave of politics; but it will be at the expense of forfeiting the respect of those who regard history as a serious subject, and the office of historian as one not lightly to be assumed.’Footnote 73 Dunlop seemed most offended by the way Stopford Green had transgressed the principles of objectivity and detachment to produce a history that, in his view, had devalued the very discipline itself. Academic writing, according to A. Suresh Canagarajah, is both ordered and governed by both ‘communicative conventions’ and ‘social conventions’ in the production and reception of texts.Footnote 74 Professional disciplines function like communities structured by rules and discursive regulations. For over thirty years, Stopford Green was a celebrated insider within the elite circles of professional history and yet, with this book, she denounced her peers and the mainstream version of the past supporting the values and privileges of English power in Ireland. Her eristic perspective was misconstrued by those same peers who were oblivious to the manoeuvre that her history had initiated.
A review by the Rev. H. J. Lawlor, professor of ecclesiastical history at T.C.D. (1898–1933), developed a more specific argument regarding the partial and contradictory use of sources, and the extravagant claims made from the reading of the evidence.Footnote 75 His preferred method of attack was to unpick a specific thread of narrative: the commerce and learning of Waterford. By showing the fault lines in Stopford Green's argument, he warned ‘that much caution must be exercised by readers of her book’.Footnote 76 Equally little tolerance was shown by the historian Goddard Orpen. He took issue with Stopford Green's efforts to find common ground between the Gaels and Anglo-Irish, and her agenda to write a history that transcended factionalism and that ‘leaves out all hint of disturbance or discord in Ireland except that caused by English interference’.Footnote 77 A slightly more forgiving review by Edward P. Cheyney, a leading exponent of scientific history in the U.S. and future president of the American Historical Association, found the book ‘refreshing’ and noticed the continuities in her history of fifteenth-century town life. But he, too, had questions concerning her ‘incoherent assertions’ and the lack of chronological structure.Footnote 78 The one positive review, which agreed with the position that Irish history had been largely written from ‘the point of view of a conquering people’, was forthcoming from the distinguished toponymist and Scotland's leading Gaelic scholar, William J. Watson. He appreciated how Stopford Green's purpose was to draw attention to the ‘peaceful activities’ of medieval Ireland while recognising how the ‘intensity of racial hatred’ had not been elided.Footnote 79
The most excoriating response was placed unsigned in the Irish Church Quarterly Review, a publication founded in 1908, and very much reflecting the views of the Protestant elite of Trinity College. Whether Mahaffy was involved in the riposte is unknown. The opening paragraph referred to the accumulation of criticism in mainstream journals and ventured to suggest that Stopford Green's efforts to refute her critics were so scattered that they should be drawn together into ‘one systematic Apologia’.Footnote 80 Having dismissed her for ‘pandering to the prejudices of the Irish nationalists’, the review then entered a rather exasperated rebuttal of her remonstrance of English sources. And as for her suggestion of pastoral peace and integration, her critics were having none of it: ‘We take Ireland then, as it is even now, to have been the land of violent contrasts.’Footnote 81
In assessing this barrage of negative reaction, it is evident that if there was consensus about the issues with the sources, there was little appetite to confront the larger points about the silencing and disremembering of a vernacular version of medieval Ireland. Stopford Green predicted that her work would cause considerable reverberations and she had initiated a counterattack from some way out. Her main rejoinder was made in a speech, ‘Ireland in the middle ages’, delivered in Dublin before the National Literary Society in the last days of 1908.Footnote 82 While she was prepared to concede some minor errors, she did not back down from her main arguments. However, it was Dunlop's review that gave her cause for most concern. She had tried to obtain proof sheets in advance of the publication of his article from Rowland Prothero, a former editor of the Quarterly Review and an old friend.Footnote 83 In early February, she wrote to Macmillan saying that her response to Dunlop had ‘cost me a lot of time’.Footnote 84 Nevertheless, her reply – a substantial essay – appeared in March as ‘Tradition versus enquiry in Irish history’.Footnote 85 Her defence opened with a definition of the controversy as a theological dispute. On one side were ‘venerable traditions’ supporting an ‘orthodox faith’ that was mired down in unexamined perspectives and an intolerant refusal to acknowledge new evidence and independent enquiry. Stopford Green maintained that her argument supported a contrary position based on an entirely original understanding of medieval Ireland that was rooted in new scholarship, contemporary translation and research into European archives. She robustly refuted the primacy and authority of the dominant English sources that were so manifestly directed at buttressing the power of the crown and restricting Ireland inside an English framework. She condemned academic intransigence: the blank refusal on the part of the discipline to tolerate an alternative perspective. She challenged the consensus where ‘complete unanimity takes on in course of time the character of the highest truth’.Footnote 86 Moreover, she noted that Dunlop's language was structured by an implicit prejudice and explicit colonial attitudes.Footnote 87
In a separate response, this time to Lawlor's review in the Scottish Historical Review, Stopford Green conjectured as to why there was so much opposition to her argument that ‘the colonists and the Irish got on well together [and] learned to live together happily and profitably for their country’.Footnote 88 Her idea that there was much more intermarriage and collaboration over trade was a concept that seemed to rankle deeply. It interfered with the idea that there were distinct and irreconcilable Celtic and English civilisations. Stopford Green's thesis attacking the sectarian divisions of Ireland and the cultural divisions along confessional lines became a critical motif in her historiography as she worked to avoid partition and draw competing communities together.Footnote 89
In October 1909, a second edition of The making of Ireland and its undoing was published. This included a five-fold enlargement of the list of sources and ‘additional proofs’ included in an appendix that ran to sixty pages. This appendix was printed too as a separate supplementary volume to the first edition.Footnote 90 In a new preface, Stopford Green claimed that the corrections and additions ‘do not affect my general line of argument or my conclusions, which I have seen no reason to change’. The opportunity was also taken to throw out a challenge to her peers: ‘Is it too much to hope that English historians should reconsider the history of Ireland which is at present circulated in schools and universities?’Footnote 91
Stopford Green found herself in the limelight again in May 1910 when she was one of seventeen ‘Irish women of letters’ invited to a banquet hosted by the Corinthian Club at the Gresham Hotel in Dublin and in the presence of the lord lieutenant and countess of Aberdeen.Footnote 92 Some of the other women writers included Rosa Mulholland (Lady Gilbert), Violet Martin (Martin Ross), Edith Somerville, Katherine Cecil Thurston, Nannie Lambert Power O'Donoghue, and the organist and composer, Dr Annie Patterson. After various introductions, Stopford Green spoke first and for significantly longer than any other of the invited women. Her speech was entertaining, self-deprecating and extorted plenty of laughter and applause.
I am aware that I stand before you to-night a person much suspected. You all know the charge against me – a charge of gross partiality in the writing of history. Allow me to say a word, therefore, on partiality in history … the words ‘partial’ and ‘impartial’ in Irish affairs have a recognised technical meaning. ‘Impartial’ means a strong bias to Imperial and English interests; ‘partial’ signifies a regard for the special interests of Ireland.Footnote 93
In this comment and more broadly in the speech, she accentuated the fallacy of what would later be termed value-free history, taking a cleverly encoded jibe at Mahaffy before concluding with a rousing defence of national history. The evening ended with an apparent backdown by Mahaffy, who was scheduled to orate, but excused himself saying that he made it a rule ‘never to speak to a wearied audience’. The Corinthian dinner in various ways brought the hullabaloo over The making of Ireland and its undoing to a point of closure. But it instilled in Stopford Green an appetite for controversy and its political possibilities. In 1911, there appeared a concise and readable, pocket-sized volume, Irish nationality, commissioned by the two editors of the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, the Oxford academics H. A. L. Fisher and Gilbert Murray.Footnote 94 At the end of that year she toured with a new lecture: ‘The way of history in Ireland’. This was particularly critical of Mahaffy and developed her critique of the traditions of English history in Ireland.Footnote 95
The earliest effort to comprehend the impact of Stopford Green's intervention into Irish history might be traced to Edmund Curtis.Footnote 96 In an essay marking the publication of the first two of four volumes of Goddard Orpen's Ireland under the Normans, Curtis framed his analysis within the evidently growing divide in Irish medieval studies.Footnote 97 He identified ‘two rival schools of Irish historians arising among us’ and acknowledged that the catalyst for the divide was The making of Ireland and its undoing. To Irish revivalists, he predicted, this book ‘will be a gospel and an inspiration’ but ‘anathema to the general body of official historians in Great Britain and Ireland’.Footnote 98 In 1923, Curtis published his own survey history of medieval Ireland which Stopford Green reviewed favourably.Footnote 99
Despite the waves caused by the controversy of The making of Ireland and its undoing, Stopford Green's star remained in the ascendant. In 1911 she received an honorary D.Litt. from the University of Liverpool for her contribution to both history and the Irish language. Then, in 1915, she was appointed to be the first woman president of the Historical Association, a position which she held for three years.Footnote 100 In 1929, a few months before she died, she was elevated to be an honorary vice-president of the Royal Historical Society.Footnote 101 Whatever criticism her history might have received from her English peer group, these appointments suggest the high regard in which she was held and a level of official recognition of her organising skills, her committee work and her enthusiasm for history in both a British and an Irish context.
Her achievement in Ireland was more remarkable. Thanks to deep family connections she returned regularly to Ireland for both social and research purposes. The journal kept by her niece Elsie, married to the botanist Augustine Henry, captures the Dublin intellectual milieu within which she moved.Footnote 102 In 1919, a new edition of The making of Ireland and its undoing was published by Ireland's leading independent publishers, Maunsel & Co. Stopford Green's works reached their zenith of sales during the War of Independence. In 1921, with the support of Éamon de Valera, president of Dáil Éireann, she established Cumann Léigheacht an Phobail, an initiative to print pamphlets and organise lecture tours of the country that built on a long process in a reorientation and reimaging of the national space in Ireland.Footnote 103 Her efforts would be recognised; in 1922 she was one of four women appointed to sit in the first Seanad Éireann and was active in a number of debates.Footnote 104
Between 1917 and 1921 Stopford Green maintained residences in both central London at 36 Grosvenor Road, and in Dublin at 90 St Stephen's Green; both homes became hubs for her extended networks, the exchange of intelligence, and safe houses for political activists and republicans. Máire Comerford, who found herself ‘near the heart of the revolution’ through her job as personal assistant to Stopford Green during the War of Independence,Footnote 105 remembered
visits of George Russell, R.I. Best, Eoin MacNeill, Professor Bergin, James Douglas, Professor Edmund Curtis; others such as Erskine Childers, Mary Spring Rice, Robert Brennan, Frank Gallagher, Desmond Fitzgerald, made special appointments, or dropped in, for several of them were ‘on the run.’ I used recognize Mick Collins’ tall bicycle if it was standing in the hall when I returned to the house, and I would wait on the alert in the office till I heard him leave.’Footnote 106
Beyond her networks, Stopford Green remained very active. Among her achievements was the support she gave, along with W. B. Yeats and Eoin MacNeill, to the establishment of the Irish Manuscripts Commission.Footnote 107 She rose to the defence of the Royal Irish Academy, and advocated continuity and healing rather than division in the transition of Ireland's intellectual heritage.Footnote 108 Rising to the challenge of state formation, she worked hard to train up a new generation of officials. Scattered among her papers are remnants of speeches and notes which divulge the emphasis she placed on the role of historical precedents in conceptualising the new Ireland.Footnote 109 The relationship between law, history and state authority had long fascinated her. In 1924, for instance, she gave a lecture to the Incorporated Law Society asking two basic questions: ‘What is the state and what do we want the state to do?’Footnote 110
In 1925, the year when the work of the boundary commission reached a head, Stopford Green published her final monograph History of the Irish state to 1014. It represented six years of research and writing, and this time reviews around the world were immensely respectful.Footnote 111 Far less polemical in tone, the study reflected Stopford Green's own transition from writing a history that was bound up with the construction of national identity to fashioning an outlook that was more in line with the conservative swerve of the Irish Free State.Footnote 112 Bringing the book through to publication appears to have brought on a serious collapse in her health. Another degree of doctor of literature, honoris causa, was conferred by the National University of Ireland in 1928.Footnote 113 Stopford Green died in May 1929 and on her gravestone she was simply remembered as ‘Historian of the Irish People’.Footnote 114
III
Stopford Green's covert political involvement further complicates her entitlement to be remembered as ‘Historian of the Irish People’. The role she had played in both the funding of the Irish Volunteers and the planning of the Howth gun-running has never been adequately assessed. Her active friendships with Roger Casement, executed for high treason by the British state in August 1916, and with Erskine Childers, executed by the Irish Free State in 1922, placed her between two establishment figures whose trajectories remain deeply contested and, indeed, painfully shared. Her influence began to wane well in advance of her death. In 1925 Curtis delivered his lecture on ‘Irish history and its popular versions’ and though it did not mention Stopford Green by name it seemed to respectfully critique her view of the medieval period.Footnote 115 With the founding of Irish Historical Studies, a more professionalised discipline initiated a gradual purge of nationalist mythology from the general understanding of the Irish past.Footnote 116 Historians engaged for decades thereafter in a Manichaean struggle against what was dismissed as ‘nationalist myth’.Footnote 117 The discipline that Stopford Green had helped to demystify was re-mystified.
Stopford Green became an easy target in this purge. Her gender, her ‘Protestant ascendancy/descendancy’ pedigree, and her romance with Ireland's past allowed for subtle ad feminam censuring and the harsh dismissals of her work referenced above. In 1967, those historians who continued to challenge the nationalist tradition were sympathetic with the short and strategically reductive biography by R. B. McDowell that damned ‘Mrs Green’ with plenty of faint praise.Footnote 118 McDowell chose to leave out her spat with Mahaffy, her long war of attrition against the unionist historians of Trinity College, and her significant connection with both the Historical Association and the Royal Historical Society. Despite a study by León Ó Broin that attempted to situate Stopford Green's network at the heart of a Protestant circle involved in the Irish War of Independence, her relevance was gradually filtered away.Footnote 119
The last revealing conjuncture in the assessment of Stopford Green came with the publication of a collection of essays on Irish historiography that captured the ideological and academic history wars fought over the Irish past in the name of ‘historical revisionism’.Footnote 120 Despite the controversy at the start of the 1990s over the lack of representation of women in The Field Day anthology of Irish writing, Ciaran Brady's edited collection of essays did not include a single contribution by a woman historian and was silent on issues to do with women's history or social history. Four essays referenced Stopford Green; two reduced her to a footnote,Footnote 121 but two essays gave her a central positioning. The most overtly antagonistic was by R. F. Foster who adopted a peculiarly hostile reading of Stopford Green in his seminal essay ‘History and the Irish question’.Footnote 122 In an acrimonious and reductive slap down, he claimed that Stopford Green was not seeking ‘to produce a scientific or a poetic history’. Alluding to the blindness that had afflicted her in her late adolescence, he wrote how ‘her view of history represented a similarly restricted vision, and an ability to feed omnivorously on preconceptions … she may be seen as a representative of those Ascendancy Irish whose insecurity drove them to extremes of identification, much as the urban nationalist intellectuals of the era embarked upon a narodnik search for “the West”’.Footnote 123 This was a harsh assault on a woman who had struggled against a deeply patriarchal professionalised discipline, a severe physical disability and without the support of a university. A less affective critique was forthcoming from Steven Ellis who objected to that interpretative framework of the medieval world which he broadly identified as a nationalistic ‘whig’ tradition or ‘green whiggery’.Footnote 124 He challenged those concepts and perspectives that projected the constitutional legitimacy of the Irish Free State back to medieval precedents and treated Ireland as isolated from both Scottish and Welsh border experiences. Though Ellis's argument focused on Curtis, he considered him as the most able constituent of an axis that included both Stopford Green and MacNeill.Footnote 125 In a contrary positioning, Brian P. Murphy deployed Stopford Green in his critique of Foster and a broader, elitist and anti-nationalist logic underpinning Irish revisionism, which in various ways extended from the same unionist tradition that had so robustly opposed Stopford Green.Footnote 126
Stopford Green was exiled to the forgotten field of historical enquiry while her political involvement was diminished with equal callousness. Her very presence seemed embarrassing. Within the academy in both Britain and Ireland she fell victim to the strategies of oblivion imposed on those inconvenient and unsettling junctures of Anglo-Irish interpretation where history had the potential to disrupt. When her name was mentioned, it was generally tagged with labels such as ‘amateur’, ‘passionate’, ‘siren of nationalism’, or, as in the quotation above, ‘Ascendancy Irish’, descriptors that helped to assign her to the unexamined and isolated margins of the revolutionary generation.Footnote 127
Beginning in the 1990s, the scholarly recovery of women historians in the West and their role in the shaping of modern historiography provided an alternative framework for re-evaluating Alice Stopford Green. Her significance was recognised by scholars such as Joan Thirsk, Bonnie Smith and, most recently, Helen Kingstone.Footnote 128 In Ireland, however, her relevance remained remote and unsettling, and in most recent work her name was conspicuously absent. The work of the Boston-based historian, Nadia Smith persists as the most thoughtful recognition of Stopford Green's contribution to early twentieth-century historiography. The women of the revolutionary generation who were most fondly remembered were the radical voices: most notably Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Countess Markiewicz – those women, unlike Stopford Green, who had not compromised. So, how might we read the purging of Alice Stopford Green from the narrative?
IV
Read through the prism of Ireland's professionalised discipline, it is easy to see why Stopford Green's historical scholarship was condemned for failing to meet the standards imposed by a new generation of practitioners. A century on and her study reads like a well-crafted literary opus; it is picturesque and poetic, rendering the vivid world in the manner of a pre-Raphaelite canvas detailing medieval perfection, promoting a sense of peace and harmony. But if it now appears idealistic and quaint, her broader critique has not lost its edge. What the professional discipline objected to was her intentional instrumentalising of history in the struggle for national independence. Stopford Green had self-consciously recognised the fictional element in all history that resulted from the forging of empirically-validated fact with the historian's imagination to produce any discourse about the past. She wrote that ‘History may be conceivably treated as a science. Or it may be interpreted as a majestic natural drama or poem. Either way has much to be said for it.’Footnote 129 Encoded into her public commentary between 1908 and 1912, she set out an articulate and measured positioning of her own views on historical practice. In the vein of Friedrich Nietzsche, she identified how the ordering of knowledge was a way of exerting power, but it could never escape from ideological biases: objectivity was a myth. Her argument unsettled existing positivist and empirical conventions, and transparently harnessed a new interpretation in a bid to catalyse change, awaken consciousness and conjure up the spirits of the Irish dead to the service of a new Ireland. To that end her history must be read on its own terms, but this should not diminish recognition of the part it played in shaping the national imagination in the build up to rebellion in 1916 and throughout the War of Independence.
The controversy around The making of Ireland and its undoing drew out Stopford Green's mindful strategy to expand the revivalist link with an idealised reconstruction of the medieval world and the planting of a political claim to nationhood and self-government. Ciaran Brady has observed how historical discourse is ‘shaped and sustained by a complex network of inherited ideas, assumptions and prejudices out of which no particular selection can make a special claim to objectivity’.Footnote 130 If that is the case, then should Stopford Green's work be so readily dismissed? Mythology was a key constituent of the Irish cultural revival and in the construction of a new sense of identity and national purpose. But myths, as Joseph Mali has persuasively argued in his analysis of mythistory, are not ‘false histories’ but critical constituents in the imagining of a community.Footnote 131 Modern historiography both recognises and embraces myth as ‘a major factor in the configuration of social reality’.Footnote 132 Stopford Green's histories intentionally forged a mythistory as intrinsic to the deeper intellectual preparation for self-determination. The conscious legitimisation of the struggle for ‘freedom’ had to be built upon continuity with a past where ‘Gaelic’ Ireland became both visible and credible. In his analysis of Irish history and historical fictions, Philip O'Leary has noted how Stopford Green's history ‘cleared the way for creative explorations and interpretations of native history by Gaelic writers and playwrights’.Footnote 133 Many fell under her spell, among them Michael Collins who used her publications to scaffold his own sense of Ireland's past.Footnote 134
Far from representing a ‘restricted vision’, as claimed by her critics, Stopford Green posited a re-visioned history, breaking with the dominant tradition of a unionist epistemology and interrupting the boundaries implicit in the prejudiced and asymmetrical formulations of Ireland's past that bound the Irish people absolutely to England and the Act of Union. Her narrative endeavoured forthrightly to invent a sense of Irish national tradition and catalysed a progressive rethinking of social categories that crossed boundaries of gender, race and class. Part of her achievement was how she inspired new creative and cultural explorations of identity and succeeded in fusing the historical materialism of James Connolly with more moderate positions of, for instance, George Russell or James Bryce. Her critique of history had much in common with the social historian Howard Zinn's reflection: ‘The chief problem in historical dishonesty is not outright lying. It is omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of “important,” of course, depends on one's values.’Footnote 135
Stopford Green's values allowed for a different kind of historiography to emerge in and about Ireland, one that centred on the nation and one that Sandra Holton has cautiously ascribed to a ‘female consciousness’.Footnote 136 John Hutchinson has argued: ‘Whether they are aware of it or not, most Irish historians are methodological nationalists since they tend to take for granted the nation as the proper unit of analysis.’Footnote 137 To that end, the revolutionary claims made about her work by Tom Kettle and others can be now recognised for how her methodology helped to sever medieval Ireland from an Anglocentric framework in the pre-1916 nationalist imaginary and replaced it with a sense of legitimate independent authority. With Eoin MacNeill, she pioneered that unitary logic of the nation that endures as the platform upon which much research on medieval Ireland is organised to this day. The period c.1200–1600 remains a vibrant one for study and much new research has been produced on the identity politics of that period.Footnote 138 Her view that the fifteenth century was a period of economic expansion and that ‘Celt and Norman’ cultural identities were becoming fused are now accepted orthodoxies for medieval historians. Though rare is the contemporary study that references The making of Ireland and its undoing, this does not diminish the influence Alice Stopford Green's intervention had upon her generation. Irrespective of its academic value today, her history was instrumental in building the collective consciousness of the Irish Revolution.Footnote 139
