Free The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O'Sullivan

something she had to do to stamp her individuality on the world. Her rebellion made her independent of family tradition: by being dubbed the ‘Madame Roland of Ireland’, she broke out of the Oedipal relationship, broke from daughterhood, and created for herself what she most wanted: an autonomous identity. She stepped into the limelight, and became a public figure. She was established as a paradox: a Protestant nationalist, a bourgeois rebel, a revolutionary who was excessively at ease in the bosom of the Establishment. Jane laughed knowingly at her own contradictions. When shortly afterwards she was received by Lord Aberdeen at Dublin Castle, she told Hilson, ‘Lord Aberdeen smiled very archly as he bent to kiss my cheek, which is the ceremony of presentation. I smiled too and thought of Jacta Alea Est.’ 28 Jane never tired of laughing at the Establishment to which she owed her privileges.

6
    Flirtations, Father Figures and Femmes Fatales
    Jane caught the attention of many men, one of whom was the novelist William Carleton. They met shortly after Jane had come to public attention in the 1848 rebellion. What we know about the relationship comes mainly from Jane’s correspondence with Hilson, to whom she sent Carleton’s letters, hoping perhaps to arouse his jealousy. Carleton stood high in Ireland’s literary circles, and Jane was obviously flattered to have the attention of this literary luminary. Born in 1794, Carleton was twenty-seven years Jane’s senior. The Carleton family was itself a populous community of fourteen children, trying to survive on the proceeds from their tenant farm in county Tyrone. Like many poor boys, Carleton received instruction at a hedge school (so called because of their rural setting) from Catholic priests who organised a curriculum that bespoke their ambition to raise devout men.
    Profoundly inspired by religion, Carleton thought of joining the priesthood, before spurning Catholic doctrine. Rural Ireland had nurtured in him a hatred of violence, a strong tendency to identify with its victims, and a belief that succumbing to the dictates of the Catholic priesthood was a tyranny no worse than that of the rapacious landlords. On the strength of his own experience he wrote a controversial letter in 1826 to the then home secretary, Sir Robert Peel, urging him against Catholic emancipation, offering to provide evidence of Daniel O’Connell’s involvement in agrarian crime. To Peel, who was an outspoken opponent of emancipation, he vilified the Catholic priests and schoolteachers for their tyrannical rule over their flock.
    Carleton’s
Traits and Stories of Irish Peasantry
, published in 1830, made Dublin sit up and take notice. His unsparing criticism and occasional exaggeration of the Irish character won him as many enemies as friends. He saw himself, as he put it in his 1834 preface to
Tales of Ireland
, as the ‘historian of their habits and manners, their feelings, their prejudices, their superstitions, and their crimes’. Carleton turned Protestant. But he continued to write stories exposing the sham in all creeds. His search for the underside of human character made him the writer partisans could not tolerate. Snubs certainly came from the Catholic priesthood, who had no use for Carleton’s unsparing view of Ireland. Despite the diligence with which he produced books, Carleton remained poor until the state awarded him a pension of £200 in 1849, granted by Lord John Russell, prime minister at the time, in response to a petition by a handful of Dublin patrons. He continued to produce work until a few years before he died in 1869. 1
    Hilson disapproved of Jane’s friendship with Carleton. He thought Carleton, a married man, had been too familiar in his correspondence with Jane and overstepped the boundaries of decorum. Jane protested, saying it was simply Carleton’s artistic way of putting things.
    You have misjudged my friend