More than three centuries after his death, the multi-faceted genius of Jonathan Swift remains as glorious as ever. If there is a single towering figure of Irish cultural life, it is he, Ireland's Goethe. Few professional historians could hope to match the perception, unobtrusive intelligence and understanding of the politics of the period which Arnold brings to this elegant, incisive and subtley atmospheric long essay, which says far more about Swift the man and his times than books four times its length. "Great issues were fought out in the century of Swift's birth", observes Arnold, "the rights of monarchy, the strength of the law, the balance of power between central authority and the owners of land throughout the kingdom. But if one single matter remained critical throughout it was Protestantism: its survival, its shape and character."
Arnold follows his subject between the two worlds he inhabited, that of Ireland and England, the latter of which most satisfied his political yearnings and where, for a time, he was a considerable player. Presenting him as an ambitious, insecure man quick to register a slight, Arnold is persuasive in his reading of Swift's contrasting feelings for the women in his life, the two Esthers, Vanessa and Stella. Following the deaths of both women, the long-silent pamphleteer and writer re-emerged stronger than ever with Gulliver's Travels.. Arnold is equally shrewd on A Modest Proposal. There is an abiding sense of justice in the belated admiration Swift would receive in England and Ireland - where Arnold says he became less a Tory attacking Whigs, more "an Irishman defending local interests against the centralist oppression" of the Westminister Parliament. So Swift, survivor of political changes in fortune, became a national hero, his death in 1745 "an occasion for national mourning." All the beauty and humanity, as well as the savage indignation of a true original whose shadow is long, are deftly evoked in a disciplined work which should be required reading for students and specialists.
Eileen Battersby
Ishbel: Lady Aberdeen in Ireland. By Maureen Keane. Colourpoint Books. 252pp. £9.99 in UK
ON the back of this book is posed the question: was Lady Aberdeen "insufferably arrogant or a saintly philanthropist?" Could she not have been both? After all, Lady Aberdeen's career suggests she had a firm belief in the possibility of having one's cake and eating a generous slab of it. Her work in Ireland, as wife of the Viceroy on two occasions, was marked by strongly-held opinions trenchantly expressed. During her husband's second term here, from 1906 to 1915, she was responsible for establishing a number of organisations - such as the Women's National Health Association which led the battle against tuberculosis - all of which were inspired by a desire to improve the lot of the less fortunate. Regrettably for Lady Aberdeen, she persistently found herself faced with two difficulties, one being a grudging reluctance on the part of those whose circumstances she sought to improve. More problematically, her time here coincided with the rise of the Nationalist movement, members of which saw her philanthropy as a form of covert imperialism.
She was, therefore, as much denigrated as praised. Maureen Keane is an unabashed fan, but others who had to face this authoritative woman were often less enchanted.. It is evident that, as first president of the International Council of Women, she was an early feminist but one who, because of her circumstances and upbringing, could not countenance the more extreme methods of the Suffragettes. Had she been born in more recent times, she would no doubt now be the head of a global corporation. Instead, despite her exertions, she has been largely forgotten in the country where she worked so hard. Maureen Keane's book should do much to ensure she is better remembered.
Robert O'Byrne
La Grande Therese or The Greatest Swindle of the Century. By Hilary Spurling. Profile Books. 119pp. £7.99 in UK
Therese Daurignac "lied as a bird sings", according to one of her contemporaries in late 19th-century Toulouse. Worthy of a novel sequence by Balzac, she rose from rural poverty to a position of immense wealth and influence in the Third Republic on the strength of a confidence trick. Therese's childhood fibs about wealthy relatives and distant chateaux matured into an elaborate plot to raise money on the strength of an impending legacy from a American billionaire called Crawford. Reinventing herself as an heiress, she married the son of a respected Toulouse politician, Senator Gustave Humbert, who became Minister for Justice and was advanced funds on the basis of his daughter-in-law's benefactors. To sustain the fiction, various impediments to the legacy had to be invented, which necessitated protracted litigation. The Humbert v Crawford case passed through every court in France, keeping hundreds of lawyers occupied and, like the Jarndyce and Jarndyce suit in Bleak House, threatened to run indefinitely. Meanwhile extortion, blackmail and violence were employed by Therese's brother to silence the growing clamour from the family's legions of creditors. When the web of corruption was finally exposed in 1902 and thousands who had invested in the family's bank lost their life savings, the Humbert Affair threatened to bring down the judiciary and revived the still recent Dreyfus Affair. Hilary Spurling stumbled upon contemporary accounts of La Grande Therese when she was researching her biography of Matisse. Published in miniature hardback format with period typography and illustrations, her account is scholarly, restrained and crisply detached. It refrains from psychological speculation or theorising, as if she wants to let the fairytale aspect of Therese's story speak for itself. The film rights have already been sold and this intriguing glimpse into the self-consciously ostentatious milieu of Belle Epoque Paris should keep the BBC's costume designers busy for months.
Helen Meany
Eileen Battersby, Robert O'Byrne and Helen Meany are Irish Times journalists