![]() ![]() This statement encapsulates a central aspect of Johnston's parable-like novels. "I know that in the end I will drown," they shout. What the characters in my books are trying to do … is to keep for a few moments their heads above the waters of inexorable history. Yet, in spite of the apparent familiarity of the setting and subject matter, and even the depiction of family relationships in her novels, it is far too limiting to regard Johnston merely as a Big House novelist. ![]() This attempt is doomed to failure from the start the barriers to be surmounted being too well entrenched in time and history. All her novels focus on a situation in which a member of the Anglo-Irish is led to try to overcome their political and personal isolation by creating a relationship, across the barriers of national identity, class, religion, and political allegiance, with a member of the native Irish. There are, of course, reasons for grounding Johnston in this tradition. ![]() Jennifer Johnston is often described as a Big House novelist, writing in the tradition (beginning with Maria Edgeworth and continuing to William Trevor) of those who delineate the plight of theĪnglo-Irish, strangers alike in Ireland and England, living an attenuated half-life of divided loyalties and allegiances in crumbling houses filled with the ghostly remains of better days and a broader culture, more and more alienated from the world of the native Irish around them, treated by their former inferiors with, at best, indifference, at worst, open hostility. ![]()
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