Emily Lawless’s fourth novel, Grania: The Story of an Island, published in two volumes, was eagerly awaited by her readership. Like her third novel, Hurrish (1886), Grania focused on a poor Irish family and was intent on leading its readers to a new sympathy and understanding of major Irish problems, many of which resulted from neglect by the English.

The isolated setting of Inishmann, the middle island of the three islands in Galway Bay, reflected metaphorically the isolation felt by the novel’s three main characters: Grania, her half-sister Honor, and her fiancé, Murdough Blake. With infertile ground often wrapped in storms, the island symbolizes Grania herself, whose healthy physique and indomitable spirit are not enough to save her from a tragic fate. Like the island, she remains vulnerable to the seasonal elements, with the changeable atmosphere paralleling her own emotional conflict and upheaval.

The opening description of the “whole expanse of sky” over Galway Bay as “everywhere a broad indefinable wash of greyness, a grey so dim, uniform, and all-pervasive, that it defied observation,” foreshadows Grania’s own colorless life. Lawless titles the novel’s sections with names of seasons and months, literally marking the time of the islanders’ existence.

When Grania’s father, twice disappointed by wives who deserted him through death, dies himself, Grania’s sister raises her. As her symbolic name indicates, Honor retains the purest of characters. However, she lacks Grania’s strength and falls ill of consumption, dying a slow death. Her religious bent is not shared by Grania and represents some of society’s many rules to which Grania is forced to conform.

The island world is one of sacrifice. Men give their hopeless existence to liquor, and their women either die birthing children who will also likely die, or live to become the shrewish flock that constantly criticizes Grania for her masculine strength and desire for a love match, rather than the formal, planned marriages that most of the older women endure.

Feminist critics find of interest Grania’s masculine characteristics, as well as the passages regarding abuse of women that is accepted as tradition by the Irish community. As she does in Hurrish, Lawless suggests in this novel through an anti-marriage speech by Honor that a convent and the life of a nun may be the better choice for many women.

When Grania asks whether Honor ever “cared” for a man, Honor cries, “Men is a terrible trouble, Grania, first and last. What with the drink and the fighting and one thing and another, a woman’s life is no better than an old garron’s down by the seashore. . . . There’s nothing for a woman like being a nun—nothing, nothing!”

However, Lawless also characterizes priests as equally abusive as husbands. When Honor expresses horror over Grania’s attitude toward a priest who unjustly punished a small girl, declaring that priests cannot be compared to men, Grania mutters to herself, “I’d think him a man if he hit me, let him be what he would!”

Lawless subverts traditional symbols as she maps out Grania’s future. Spring, a traditional symbol of rebirth and new life, brings death to the potato crops with too much rain. Even light takes on a negative meaning in superb descriptive passages, such as: “It was growing dark, but there was a pale splinter of white light far away, almost lost on the horizon—a sinister light, like a broken war-arrow. Everywhere else the plain was one mass of leaden-coloured waves, solid and unillumined.”

Better weather at last arrives, freeing Grania from what had felt like entombment, but only temporarily. When she agrees to travel to the mainland with Murdough to visit the Galway Fair, she anticipates adventure. Instead, Murdough deserts her, her dignity is threatened by the pressing crowds, and she experiences an epiphany after witnessing abject poverty.

Suddenly, she recognizes “a new impression upon the intolerableness of life, its unspeakable hopelessness, its misery, its dread, unfathomable dismalness. Why should people go on living so?” When Murdough finally reappears, she barely hears the explanation for his delay and separates from the group immediately upon their return to the island.

She convinces herself that Murdough only wants to marry her for her property. However, Grania later decides she prefers his misuse to living without him. But when he continues to visit the mainland, returning only to borrow money from Grania, she ends their engagement. She will again regret that decision and shame herself with a plea to Murdough that he ignores. In allowing Murdough to shake her self-trust, Grania relinquishes her special strength, her remarkable spirit.

In the novel’s conclusion, Grania sacrifices herself to Honor’s religious beliefs, although she has never shared her sister’s vision. She agrees to go by boat in a storm to the mainland to pick up a priest for Honor’s last rites, but the boat sinks. She boosts the young boy who has accompanied her to safety, but she cannot escape.

Grania calls for Murdough as the sea lifts her up on a symbolic natural raft of seaweed, the substance she had depended on for her livelihood. As Grania accepts her fate, Lawless constructs a scene of last rites every bit as spiritual as the Catholic ritual craved by Honor. The sea builds a funeral bier for Grania, its own child, and “Sea, sky, land, water, everything seemed alike to be lapped in the drowsiest, the most complete and immovable repose. Sleep seemed everywhere to be the order of the hour, to have taken possession of all things.”

Psychoanalytic critics find of interest Grania’s sleep of death and the return to the dreamy state she has previously experienced. Reality dissolves into fantasy, suggesting the human condition is more a matter of one’s private perception than of material existence.

Lawless’s imminently readable works remain available in both hard print and electronic text. Their timeless themes strike a chord with modern readers.

Bibliography
Wolff, Robert Lee. Introduction to Grania, the Story of an Island, by Emily Lawless. Vol. I. New York: Garland Publishing, 1979, vi–xv.

Categories: British Literature, Irish Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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