Department of English
Dr Tina O'Toole, University of Limerick
1 March 2023
O'Rahilly 2.12 and online via Teams
Rosamond Jacob’s novel The Troubled House (1938) bears witness to the radical ideas available to Irish women of the revolutionary generation in twentieth-century Dublin. However, its publication history underlines the gradual curtailing of women’s rights and their subsequent invisibility in the emerging Irish “free” state. Jacob completed her novel but could not find a publisher for it; it was finally published in 1938 by Browne & Nolan in Dublin and it has been out of print more or less ever since (although it does appear in extract in Field Day IV& V). The novel has much to offer contemporary readers, not least in foregrounding the disjunct between the wartime experience and political aspirations of Jacob’s protagonists and the mid-century hardships experienced by this former member of Cumann na mBan and her peers. Moreover, the imbrication of contemporary visual art experiments in the novel brings it into conversation with avant garde culture in the period. Using The Troubled House as a case study to focus on the interconnections between the radical work of feminist writers and visual artists in that period, my research explores such efforts to interrogate and challenge the deadly culture of containment put in place here in the first half of the twentieth.