Modernism, Internationalism and the Russian Revolution by Ayers David;

Author:Ayers, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Stella’s ‘defiance’, then, is a response to her origins, whether by birth or by culture. Stella’s approach to the question of women’s independence – or, more particularly, to her own independence – is of a piece with her modernism and socialism. Brought up by her father on his estate in Ireland, Stella is relatively isolated because of her class. Unlike other absentee landlords, Stella’s father remains on his estate instead of delegating all the work to an estate manager. However, the father is no socialist and maintains a business-like attitude. Stella tries to make friends outside of her class, but falls out with father when he evicts tenants she has befriended as a drunken father cannot pay the rent. Stella has promised their son, Jim, that the eviction will not take place, but she is too young to influence her father and cannot make good her promise – a hint that the well-meaning rich will break their promises to the poor, and that Stella’s rebelliousness may have a more virtual than practical character.

After the outbreak of war, as the Irish struggle for independence grows, Stella identifies with the oppressed Irish, angering her father with her ‘socialistic views’.49 She marries a neighbour, but the union lasts only six months, long enough to give her a son, Desmond. The husband is killed in the war – a motif derived from Sheridan’s own life, although the circumstances are quite different – and the real point of the marriage is to give her a son, and examine her attitude to maternity.

Stella’s next important relationship begins in London, with one Lord Anthony Tremaine. Tremaine seems to have been based on Lord Alexander Thynne, a lover of Sheridan until his death in combat only weeks from the Armistice.50 Among other functions, Anthony provides the theme in this novel of the lost husband who may eventually return, a theme shared with Sheridan’s next novel, The Thirteenth (1925), which narrates the succession of (thirteen) lovers its female protagonist takes in search of her missing husband. Even though Stella’s return to Anthony never takes place, this narrative thread gives the novel a conservative bent, linking Stella’s rebellious politics to the psychology of her rejection of patriarchal conservatism. Indeed, while in the novel it is Stella whose support of Irish independence outrages her father, in Sheridan’s own life it was her father who supported Home Rule and indeed became MP for Cork as a member of the Irish Nationalist Party.51 In the novel, Anthony represents conservatism and stability as opposed to Stella’s support of the Irish struggle and modernism. It seems that he is being set up as the lodestar of British conservatism to which she will eventually return, but this does not happen. His attitude to Stella is in a way paternalistic. ‘Others laughed at Stella’s uncompromising modernism, but [not] Anthony.’ Yet ‘It was this absurd modernism of hers that stood between them [. . .]’. When Stella teases Anthony about the traditional paintings in his old house and asks him

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