Out of Ireland : Turning Family Lore into Fiction

Out of Ireland : Turning Family Lore into Fiction

When my mother died at the age of ninety-nine, her memory gone, I had already begun a novel inspired by the life of her grandmother, an Irish Immigrant, named Ellen Hickey Sullivan Jewett. In the year before my mother’s death, I read to her the first pages I had written.  She wept as I described the scene in which her grandmother lay dying, and my mother, then a slim thirteen year old, went to visit her in her bedroom. Ellen had been my mother’s best friend in the bustling household of her parents, with one older sister, six brothers, and her widowed grandmother.  My mother, the second youngest child, told me stories of how her grandmother protected her from the antics of her teasing brothers, how she would jump into bed with her grandmother on stormy nights when lightening flashed and thunder rattled the windows of the three-story house on Barrett Street in St. Louis. 

Besides this oral history, I also had letters from my grandmother, Nettie Ward, and her sister Alice, who in 1967 corresponded by letter although they lived right across the Mississippi River from one another, Alice in East St. Louis and Nettie in St. Louis proper. In the letters my mother saved, the two sisters reminisce about the details of their mother’s early life in Bantry, Ireland, her too early marriage to an older widower she did not love, how the couple left Ireland with their little son and braved the ocean voyage to America sometime in the 1870s.

These few details became the seeds of my desire to write a novel in which I could imagine what this young woman’s inner life had been, born in Ireland when it was still an occupied country, with Irish Catholics as second class citizens with no right to vote, to attend university, hold public office, and whose attempts at gaining independence from Britain were met by harsh treatment from British troops stationed in their country for over 300 years. Great wealth was in the hands of the Anglo-Irish, people originally from England, who owned the grand estates with land awarded to them by English monarchs for service to the Crown. Thus it is no surprise that young people would dream of escape from such oppression, and in my novel I wanted to explore this reality. 

I spent two years researching Irish history in the 1860s and 70s; especially helpful was a study called Emigrants and Exiles by Kerby A. Miller, as well as two brilliant novels: Famine by Liam O’Flaherty and Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor. Then my husband and I traveled to the small town of Bantry in the southwest corner of Ireland, where my great-grandmother was born.  We stayed in one of the Big Houses, Bantry House, the beautiful estate of the Earls of Bantry, overlooking Bantry Bay and the blue Caha Mountains in the distance. It occurred to me as I walked through the grand house, that Ellen could possibly have worked as a maid in a house such as this, and so my character does in the novel.  

Much to my surprise as I wrote, another central character emerged, Eileen’s brother Michael. My great-grandmother did have two brothers, and one of them also emigrated to the States, but I knew almost nothing about him. In the novel, this unknown shadowy character emerges as a close ally of Eileen’s, and suddenly I was writing from his point of view also. He becomes involved in an illegal secret organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, dedicated to the independence of Ireland and the overthrow of British rule by any means necessary. Reading the biography of John Devoy, Irish Rebel by Terry Golway gave me the rich background I needed for placing my character in the Irish Republican Brotherhood. 

The voyage over to America had to be re-created in a believable way. It is on this voyage that a major plot point occurs, something that did actually happen to my great-grandmother and her husband at the time, a tragedy that haunted me ever since my mother told me about it. Conditions for people in steerage have been documented by many travelers, but my job as a novelist was to make readers see and feel what Eileen and her husband John are experiencing  in vivid detail. 

Since I was not sure of where my great-grandmother had actually settled after arriving in New York I fictionalized this part, placing Eileen and John in Holyoke, Massachusetts, a city where many Irish people settled in order to work in the mills that line the river there. I knew my great-grandmother had worked in a mill. Another reason for making Holyoke the setting was that I had lived there and taught in a high school for several years, so I knew the town and its climate well. 

In the portion of the novel set in St. Louis, I was on familiar ground since that is my hometown. I found and photographed the old, dilapidated, two-story brick house on St. Louis Avenue in north St. Louis, in which my grandmother Nettie, the older daughter of Ellen and her second husband, was born in 1884. In real life, Ellen had been famous for her sewing skills, and had worked in a men’s clothing store as a seamstress, so that fact was woven into the novel. And this shop would be where my fictional Eileen meets her second husband, Delancey Jordan, based on Ellen’s actual husband, Delancey Jewett.  (I could not resist that name Delancey!) 

In the novel, Michael too settles in St. Louis, and his arc of the story resulted from my research into Irish gangs of the time, who justified their criminal activities by asserting the they were raising money for the cause of Irish independence from England. Rash, impulsive, but charming, Michael’s character was the most fun to write. An especially good source for the history of Irish gangs was T. J. English’s book Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster. 

Little by little a novel emerged from the few facts I knew of these ancestors’ lives. I hope I have honored their memory by inventing a story that would shine a kind of golden light on what must have been a hard, terrifying journey with great tragedy and sacrifice, so like the headlines we read and the pictures we see of immigrants’ lives today. Today my great-grandmother’s memory is honored by hundreds of her descendants in St. Louis and all across the United States, all of us grateful for her courage and perseverance.  

Marian O’Shea Wernicke

—

Born and raised in an Irish Catholic family in St. Louis, Missouri, Marian O’Shea Wernicke is the author of the novel Toward That Which Is Beautiful, a finalist in both Literary Fiction and Romance Fiction in the 2021 Independent Book Awards, and a finalist in Multi-Cultural Fiction in the 2021 American Book Awards. She is also the author of a memoir about her father, Tom O’Shea: A Twentieth Century Man. A nun for eleven years, Wernicke worked in Lima, Peru, for three years. After leaving the religious order, Wernicke taught English as Second Language in Madrid, and later became a professor of creative writing and literature at Pensacola State College. Marian married Michael Wernicke , and they are the parents of three children. After living in Pensacola, Florida, for many years, the couple moved to Austin, Texas, to be near their children and grandson. Michael died this past December, but he lives on in his children and grandchildren.

website: marianosheawernicke.com

Facebook author page: MarianOSheaWernicke-Author

Instagram: marianosheawernicke author

OUT OF IRELAND, Marian O’Shea Wernicke

In the late 1860s in Bantry, Ireland, sixteen-year-old Eileen O’Donovan is forced by her family to marry an older widower whom she barely knows and does not love. Her brother Michael, at age nineteen, becomes involved with the outlawed Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization dedicated to the violent overthrow of British rule in Ireland. Their fates intertwine when they each decide to emigrate to America, where both tragedy and happiness await them.

An exciting coming-of-age story of a brother and sister in an Ireland still under the harsh rule of the British, Out of Ireland brings alive the story of our ancestors who braved the dangers of immigration in order to find a better life for themselves and their families.

BUY HERE

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing