Eve of Kilcargin

by Susan M. Gaffney

In 1919 Clara Bridewell, a widow of the Great War, receives an invitation to stay with her well-to-do aunt in the Irish countryside, to provide a stabilising influence on her unruly young cousin Eve. Upon arriving, she discovers that the family are destitute, and their sprawling country house is virtually a ruin. Clara soon finds herself embroiled in her aunt’s scheme to marry Eve to a wealthy young aristocrat in order to save the family home. But the feelings she develops for her cousin, and the Irish struggle for independence from Britain, threaten to derail their plans…

Eve of Kilcargin is a charming tale of family, identity, and desire versus duty, set against the backdrop of the Irish War of Independence. Originally written in rural New Zealand in the early 1950s, it would surely have been a landmark in lesbian fiction if it had ever seen the light of day, but was sadly incomplete at the time of the author’s death. The story of her brief and troubled life, and her only novel’s seventy-year journey to publication reads like a work of fiction in itself, with the manuscript believed lost in a fire until the 1990s, and finally completed in a posthumous collaboration between aunt and grandniece seven decades after its inception.

202 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 10, 2023

Reviews

[Petrina Binney · Rating 5 out of 5]

1919 and Clara, an English war widow, is invited to go and stay with her wealthy aunt in Ireland. This is partly to help Clara through her grief, and partly to help her younger cousin, Eve, by giving her a stabilising adult influence beyond the parents who are bound to be too stuffy to understand a young woman's difficulties. However, when Clara arrives in the Irish countryside, she finds that all is not as advertised. Her uncle is quite profoundly ill and is treated as a burden by near everyone in his household, her aunt still thinks herself fancy but the house is almost falling down, and her cousin is uninhibited, flighty and rather more attractive than Clara is really prepared to deal with.

What begins as an admiration laced with surprise, quickly becomes a questioning infatuation, but it can be hard to read the intentions of a free-spirited person. However, step by step, the cousins discover they have more in common that their family. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century─a tumultuous time in Ireland and, in fact, the world─the setting and the political history echoed the story in a very powerful way.

One fascinating fact about this book is that it was a lost novel, written by a young New Zealand woman and misplaced for some seventy years until the story was completed by her surviving great niece. A really important bit of New Zealand and queer literature. I'm so pleased I've read it.

[Cathy Leary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding endnotes!

Thank you for your efforts to bring your aunt's novel ( & life story perhaps?) to light. So, so much has already been lost about sapphic life before the 1970's and novels about sapphic life in Ireland are virtually non-existent. Excellent work to bring a long lost story to life!