THREE-DIMENSIONAL
THE STRANGER IN IRELAND, by Constantia Maxwell; Jonathan Cape, English price 25/-. AS I was submitted in my schooldays ""™ to teachers obsessed with "the woes of holy Ireland," I have ever since, in reaction, been completely indifferent to Irish history. Perhaps, too, what seems a persistent Irish tendency to judge contemporary situations in the light of what happened centuries ago has made me still less sympathetic to catalogues of Hibernian miseries. In any case, I didn’t expect to be as absorbed and moved ‘as I have been by this unusually fine recreation of Irish history from Elizabeth's reign to the Great Famine. Its impact is greater because it is not anti-Partition propaganda or historical special pleading, but a scholarly and judiciously balanced study. Dr. Maxwell, formerly Professor of Modern History at Dublin University, has summarised the assessments of German, French, Italian and English visitors to Ireland, elaborated and commented on them, and set them in the wider context of each century’s history. It is not an anthology, but a re-seeing of Ejire’s past, with the aid of observers, sympathetic and _unsympathetic, dispassionate and prejudiced, from the "planted" Spenser and the adventurous Egsex to Johann Kohl and Thackeray. Some viewed more perceptively than others the disintegrating culture of a land wasted by war and famine and exploited by England. Dr. Maxwell’s shrewd character-study of each visitor reveals what factors conditioned his attitude and enables us to judge more exactly the value of his observations. The result is a fascinating book. Perhaps the author’s historical introductions, covering more broadly the same ground as. the strangers do, make for some repetition. At the same time, she writes with such a_ wealth of human understanding that the book is not only a graphic popular history of Ireland, but (continued on next page)
BOOKS (continued from previous page)
aiso a most intriguing human document. Dr. Maxwell has hit upon a fruitful way of writing three-dimensional history.
J.C.
R.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 799, 12 November 1954, Page 15
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324THREE-DIMENSIONAL New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 799, 12 November 1954, Page 15
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