Sheila Turner Johnston: Alice: A Life of Alice Milligan (1994; repr. 2009)

This was the first biographical work on Alice Milligan, whom I came across recently when discovering about her brother Ernest (post immediately below), the ground-breaking doctor who lived in Glossop for thirty-four years. In fact Alice, with her brother William, lived in Glossop with Ernest and his family for almost ten years from 1922 to about 1932, but that's not the subject here.

Alice was an Irish nationalist, born in Omagh, who was a poet and novelist who came from a large family of siblings, including Charlotte, a sister who wrote songs and unearthed old folk songs. Her father Seaton was a businessman who was also a local historian and archaeologist.

One of the almost forgotten women who were a part of Irish politics and literary history, Alice Milligan published a number of books and was a friend of W. B. Yeats and Roger Casement, for instance. Although she never actually met the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell she was heavily influenced by him, angry with the Irish people's condemnation of him for his affair with the married Kitty O'Shea, and deeply affected by his death.

Alice never married, although it's unknown if she had any love affairs. She wanted to speak Irish, not the language of imperialism, although she never got anywhere near to mastering the language. Although she was relatively well-known in Ireland, her brother Ernest (who nevertheless wanted a biography written on her after her death), didn't appear to have any knowledge of her status while she was living.

Unfortunately, fascinating though it is to learn of Alice Milligan's life, Sheila Johnston, in spite of the undoubtedly painstaking efforts she has taken researching her subject, is manifestly not a professional researcher: there is a smack of the undergraduate project here (although Johnston is far from young), and I winced in a few places. Nevertheless, Johnston has put Milligan on the map, and I have since noted that Catherine Morris has followed up with the more scholarly Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revolution (2012).

Maeve Brennan: The Visitor (2000)

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and moved with her family to New York in 1934.  In the 1940s she was a fashion copyist for Harpers Bazaar, then wrote as 'The Long-Winded Lady' for the New Yorker, where she later often slept in the restroom as a result of alcoholism and mental illness.

She wrote short stories and her novella The Visitor, written in the 1940s, was published posthumously (Washington DC: Counterpoint Press, 2000). The UK edition (London: Atlantic Books, 2001) contains a Foreword by Clare Boylan, in which she says:

'Brennan doesn't just write about loneliness. She inhabits it. She exhibits it. She elevates it to an art form. The shy, the dispossessed, the dominated, are seen not in the world but teetering on some perilous rim of it, from where they cannot possibly keep their balance but have a unique view.'

There have been suggestions that Maeve Brennan was the principal model for the main character - Holly Golightly - in Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's.