Novelist Siobhan MacGowan follows her acclaimed debut The Trial of Lotta Rae with The Graces, a compelling historical novel set in Dublin at the turn of the 20th century, where science and faith collide.
Below, Siobhan introduces The Graces, and reveals how her family history influenced the tale.
At the heart of The Graces, set in early 20th century Ireland, is a young woman named Rosaleen Moore, who is born with the sight. A seer. It comes from her grandmother, 'touched by the Graces,' that she inherits the gift; this was inspired by my own great-grandmother, Maggie, who herself was said to be a seer. In the book Rosaleen’s grandmother foresees the death of her youngest son. This is a faithful retelling of my great-grandmother’s premonition of the death of her own child - only my great-uncle’s name has been changed.
Stories handed down to me from the era run throughout The Graces. A scandal resulting from Rosaleen’s ‘seeing’ forces her to flee her native Clare for the capital and her Aunt Ellen’s boarding house where, subsumed into a clique of neighbouring spiritualists, she becomes celebrated for her gifts as The Rose, sought after by fashionable society, the mighty of Dublin Castle and political agitators alike.
Aunt Ellen and her husband Noel are based on my own great-aunt and uncle, Dublin natives who would have been a courting couple at the time the novel is set. As would my paternal grandmother and grandfather, and many of their old Dublin ways and anecdotes are included in the story. Bridge-playing seems to have been a favoured Dublin pastime and the rare perfect hand that the fictional Aunt Ellen stores proudly in the sideboard was, in fact, exactly how my grandmother, Eileen, preserved her own perfect hand.
As the fictional Aunt Ellen observes the unveiling of the Charles Stewart Parnell monument in October 1911, she refers to his looks, saying, ‘Those eyes, ducky!’ This was taken from a single-line telegram my grandmother sent to my grandfather, extolling his eyes, on their marriage in 1918. Some of the Eccles Street boarders are based on real Dublin characters of the time, most notably ‘Harry’ (name changed) the coachmaker who was rumoured once to be a dentist before he broke a man’s jaw!
The Eccles Street setting arose from a period in which I spent much time there. I lived in Dublin in my early adulthood but had cause to return to the city for a long duration when my elderly father became a patient in the Mater hospital. For months, I would walk up O’Connell Street (which mentally became its previous British name of Sackville Street), crossing Dorset Street to the hospital on Eccles Street.
The backstreets off the main thoroughfare of O’Connell Street, and the Eccles Street houses became greatly familiar to me. The Georgian houses reminded me of those featured in the film of James Joyce’s The Dead; the piano playing and carry-on of the aunts at the party, so often reminding me of my own great-aunts’ gatherings. Visiting the houses, which are now mainly consultants’ rooms but retain many original features, I began to imagine my story unfolding within them. As indeed it does. Not only in Aunt Ellen’s boarding house but in that of the mesmerists, the spiritualists who so revere Rosaleen and her gifts. And where and with whom she will ultimately meet her nemesis...
The Graces is published by Welbeck
