sean o’casey – Page 2

Marilyn and Sean – fashion icons

April 14, 2014January 2, 2015by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

Marilyn Monroe posing in her Aran sweater

What do Marilyn Monroe and Sean O’Casey have in common? They never met and she never appeared in any productions of the playwright’s work. However, she was a fan. On a visit to England in 1956 with then husband Arthur Miller, she said the person she most wanted to meet was O’Casey and she had read the first volume of his autobiographies. But there is another unlikely connection between them – a Dublin shop.

Cleo is a knitwear and handcrafts shop on Dublin’s Kildare Street, opened by Kitty Joyce in the 1930s, and now run by her daughter. It’s the subject of a book by Hilary O’Kelly (Cleo: Irish Clothes in a Wider World, Associated Editions). The book tells the story of the shop’s foundation and features photographs from the shop’s back catalogues of celebrity customers wearing its merchandise, including Marilyn Monroe and O’Casey.

Having spent several years inhabiting the world of Sean O’Casey while writing The Rising of Bella Casey,I thought I was familiar with almost every facet of the playwright’s life. Except this one – Sean O’Casey as fashion icon!

After O’Casey moved to London in 1926, he rarely returned to Ireland. He was stung by Yeats’s rejection of his WW1 play, The Silver Tassie, in 1928, a decision which deprived him of a natural repertory of actors to perform his work. It hardened his attitude towards Dublin and fastened his self-imposed exile in England. However he did visit Dublin at least once afterwards – he came on a holiday with his wife, Eileen, in 1935. Perhaps it was then he acquired the Aran jumper shown in the Cleo catalogue. Or perhaps it was later, sent to him as a gift or ordered by mail?

In the photograph featured here, O’Casey also wears a decorated skull cap, another distinctive accessory he favoured in latter years. In her memoir, Sean, O’Casey’s wife Eileen remembers their daughter, Shivaun, bringing home a brightly-coloured felt cap she had made in school. “Trying it on, he found it most comfortable, and this was how his collection of caps began. Frequently he was photographed in one; people would send him others from many countries, and he would make his choice for the day as the mood took him.”

The cap featured in the title of O’Casey’s last book, Under a Colored Cap,(1963), a collection of articles “merry and mournful with comments and a song” dedicated to his granddaughters, Alison and Oona. O’Casey’s daughter Shivaun used the same title for her film documentary of her father in 2005.

Sean O'Casey with his wife, Eileen, in distinctive coloured cap and Aran sweater — Sean O’Casey with his wife, Eileen, in distinctive coloured cap and Aran sweater

Reviews and articles, The World of Bella Casey

Sister in the shadows

December 14, 2013by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

Caroline Kennedy Photograph: nycprowler.com

Christina Hunt Mahoney reviewed The Rising of Bella Casey in last week’s Irish Times. Here’s her take on the novel complete with Caroline Kennedy reference!

O’Brien Press continues its impressive revival of the Brandon imprint with Mary Morrissy’s first novel in more than a decade. The Rising of Bella Casey is the imaginative afterlife of an historical person, not the first time Morrissy has constructed such a fiction. The Pretender is the postmodern tale of a Polish factory worker who claimed to have been the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Morrissy’s new book partakes of a related tradition: a fictive life of a family member who was a satellite to a great writer. We’ve had Rameau’s Niece, by Cathleen Schine, and several incarnations of Shakespeare’s sister, so why not an Irish entry into the genre?

Morrissy’s oeuvre is small but fine, also including the metafictional Mother of Pearl and a disturbing collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (the protagonist of the title story, in a timely detail, envies Caroline Kennedy’s good fortune to have had a father worthy of assassination). Morrissy’s work has been recognised with a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library and a prestigious Lannan Literary Award. She is truly a writer’s writer, but one with an avid following.

Isabella Casey was Seán O’Casey’s sister, a minor figure in his multivolume autobiography. Fifteen years her brother Jack’s senior, Bella was a second mother to the boy who would “rise” to fame years later. The real Bella married beneath her and seems to have fallen out of the family narrative. Morrissy recreates for her a life that fills the gaps in her story.

Dodging bullets

As the novel opens, on Easter Monday, 1916, we see an obsessed, middle-aged Bella risking her life, and that of her young son, dodging bullets on Dublin’s streets to drag an abandoned piano back to their house. (This is a book in which keyboard instruments come and go, indicating changes in the family’s fortunes.) Bella’s rescue of the piano is a symbolic act, restitution for years of deprivation with an abusive English soldier. The novel then returns to Bella’s early days as the promising scholarship girl, the proud new teacher in Dominick Street, and finally the victim of the violent act that brought an end to her dreams.

The geography shifts twice to England – signalled by a change in font – and the reader encounters a blocked Seán, working on his life’s story, first in Battersea and later in Totnes. Here the novel becomes more complex, also more akin to the writer’s earlier style. Not only is she creating Bella’s lost years, she is simultaneously crafting a fiction to explain Seán’s reluctance to deal with Bella’s life in print, told from his perspective. O’Casey, in Morrissy’s rendering, is a complex portrait, part socialist activist, part judgmental Edwardian brother.

His character is also hampered by being in possession of only some of the “facts” of Bella’s downfall, facts that are totally of Morrissy’s devising. There is thus something of a Chinese puzzle here, suitably couched in the melodramatic rhetoric of the period. The tone mimics some of O’Casey’s own writerly language, influenced as it was by his early exposure to the music hall and popular theatre. His characters also appear regularly, and he is given to thinking of his sister’s life as theatre.

Bella’s predicament is Dickensian, down to Morrissy’s decision to name the villain of the piece Reverend Leeper. Dickens or no, the crime committed within her pages is so brutal the nearly comical name and representation of Leeper seems to undercut the author’s intent. Similarly, with so many women in the novel who seem perfectly capable of defending themselves, one wonders at Bella’s continued naivete, pretension and timidity.

But The Rising of Bella Casey is a welcome volume, especially as we commemorate a formative stage in Ireland’s history and those who helped to make that history.

The World of Bella Casey

‘The romance of a crimson coat’

October 6, 2013October 8, 2013by Mary Morrissy6 Comments

Here’s an interview I did with Reuters – this has appeared in media as far-flung as the Hindustan Times. Reuters writer David Cutler put this one together and did a great job.

When the Irish 20th century playwright Sean O’Casey (above) came to write his autobiography, he failed to mention the impoverished last decade of his only sister’s life. It was this act of ‘literary murder’ that prompted Irish writer Mary Morrissy to write The Rising of Bella Casey, published under the Brandon imprint by O’Brien Press, Ireland’s leading children’s publisher, in its first foray into adult fiction.

Morrissy, a historical novelist who has been described as “Ireland’s Hilary Mantel”, published her first novel, Mother of Pearl, in 1995. Her second novel, The Pretender, was the fictional portrait of a woman who convinced the world she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia and had survived the slaughter of Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918.

Q: What is the historical background to the novel?

A: The Rising of Bella Casey is about Sean O’Casey’s sister, Isabella Charlotte Casey, who likely inspired some of his female characters. She ended her days as a charwoman (cleaning lady) in Dublin’s notorious slums of the 1900s. Bella was 15 years older than Sean O’Casey and like a second mother to him; not only that but it’s clear that, as a child, he adored her.

Q: Why did O’Casey reject his sister?

A: Bella was a bright, clever girl, who trained as a primary schoolteacher, which was unusual in 1880’s Dublin. But an unsuitable marriage to a hard-drinking British Army soldier put paid to Bella’s upward mobility. O’Casey, who was 12 at the time, was angry that his sister had traded her superior education “for the romance of a crimson coat”.

Q: Why fiction over fact?

A: My work explores the grey area between fiction and biography and my characters are inspired by real people. Bella Casey only existed in O’Casey’s autobiographical words, including the texts archived in the New York Public Library. I restore those missing years in my third novel and explore what led to Bella’s fall from grace. The absence of documentary evidence is a nightmare for the biographer, but for the novelist, it can be a blessing.

Q: What does the novel illustrate?

A: The novel is about sisterhood – sisterhood, that is, with a small ‘s’ – and disappointment: hers, and his disappointment in her. It is fiction so it’s speculative – it’s more what might have been. I think Bella’s hard life may have become the raw material for her brother’s plays and informed his female characters.

Q: Do Irish history and politics figure in the novel?

A: The large sweep of history is the other character. The novel covers the turbulent years of early 20th century Ireland and she witnessed the September 1913 lockout when 20,000 striking workers brought Dublin to a standstill, the outbreak of World War One and the fateful Easter Rising of 1916 before she succumbed to Spanish flu in a cruel twist of fate at the start of the epidemic in 1918.

Politics and religion also played its part in the estrangement between O’Casey and his sister. The family was Protestant and loyal to the crown, two of O’Casey’s brothers served in the British Army.

But O’Casey broke with his own tradition and became a nationalist, a socialist and an atheist. He also became a controversial playwright. When his play The Plough and the Stars, centred around the events of the Easter Rising in 1916, was staged at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, there was a riot in the auditorium over his unflattering portrait of the city’s inhabitants, looting while people died around them.

(Reporting by David Cutler; Editing by Paul Casciato and Robin Pomeroy)

Reviews and articles, The World of Bella Casey

A telling eye for incongruous detail

October 6, 2013September 3, 2019by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

Here’s what The Guardian had to say about The Rising of Bella Casey – short but definitely sweet: –

The playwright Sean O Casey composed six volumes of autobiography but didn’t reserve much space for his sister, Bella, whom he killed off at least a decade earlier than her actual demise during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. Fifteen years older, and practically a second mother to him, her principal sin was that of marrying a common soldier, thus throwing away the advantages of an above-average education “for the romance of a crimson coat”.

Morrissy’s novel restores the missing years and invents some fairly convincing extenuating circumstances – though Bella marries an obnoxious corporal with unseemly haste it is only to hide the fact that the unwelcome attention of her employer, an even more obnoxious clergyman, has left her pregnant. Morrissy reconstructs Bella’s story with a telling eye for incongruous detail: an upright piano abandoned in the street during the Easter rising opens a portal to more affluent times; while her fortitude against poverty and the influence of feckless and abusive men sets a template for the heroines of her younger brother’s plays: “Characters already born and ready made, roaming their foetid rooms in search of a writer.”

Alfred Hickling – The Guardian, Friday 4 October 2013

News and Events, The World of Bella Casey

Subtext and ghastly vicars

September 30, 2013September 30, 2013by Mary Morrissy6 Comments

Last Thursday I was interviewed by an enthusiastic Jenni Murray (above) on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour about The Rising of Bella Casey. “We loved this novel,” she said more than once. One of the things she picked up on was the subliminal references to O’Casey’s plays in the novel. You don’t have to know O’Casey’s work to enjoy this novel – but it does add another layer to the narrative for the alert reader. Using the plays as a subtext also supports the speculative thread of the novel i.e. how much Bella’s life might have leaked into O’Casey’s drama. After all, every family has its shared lore. When there’s a writer in the family that can get mined as material. We also talked about the ethics of writing about real people – even if they’re dead – and the “ghastliness” – Jenni Murray’s description – of the Reverend Leeper, the only wholly fictional character in the book. Here’s the link to the podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qlvb/episodes/player

Reviews and articles

Perfectly timed

September 14, 2013September 28, 2013by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

James Larkin during the 1913 Lock-out

Apparently, Sean O’Casey, the great Irish playwright, killed off his sister Bella in his autobiography a good ten years before she actually died — hmm. What was that about? Mary Morrissy wrote her new novel while she was fuelled by the same question. I’ve been reading drafts of this novel for some time, and I remember saying to myself at the very first, “This is going to be a good one!” I was right. Mary’s novel is beautifully written and, almost accidentally, perfectly timed for the string of historical anniversaries Ireland is commemorating in this decade, including the 1913 Lock-out, the 1916 Rising and the outcome in the 1920s. Brandon did well to pick this up. I’m almost sorry for those that didn’t (not really!).

joannecarroll.weebly.com/my-blog.html‎

Photograph: Cashman Collection, RTE Stills Library

The World of Bella Casey

What do our photographs say about us?

August 23, 2013September 5, 2013by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment

This is the only publicly available photograph of Bella Casey, the heroine of my novel, “The Rising of Bella Casey”. It is a close-up of a formal studio photograph taken in Dublin some time in the early 1890s. From this image, I had to start building the fictional character of Bella Casey. She seems an enigmatic presence in this photograph; dreamy, distant but with a certain degree of self-possession.

For a novelist writing historical fiction based on real people, as I do, there are often gaps in characters’ histories that have to be filled. The absence of documentary evidence is a nightmare for the biographer but for the writer, it can be a blessing. It creates narrative openings in between the known facts. . .

Isabella Charlotte Casey was born in 1865, the eldest of the O’Casey clan, 15 years older than her famous playwright brother, Sean O’Casey. Bella was a bright, clever girl, completing her secondary school education – unusual at the time – and going on to train as a primary schoolteacher. She taught for several years – Sean completed his primary education under her tutelage – and helped to support the rest of her family. In 1889 she married Nicholas Beaver, a soldier in the First Battalion King’s Liverpool Regiment.

O’Casey, who was 12 at the time, was intensely jealous of Beaver and later wrote that his adored sister “had married a man who had destroyed every struggling gift she had when her heart was young and her careless mind was blooming”. He felt Bella had thrown away the advantages of her superior education “for the romance of a crimson coat”. As Prof Colbert Kearney has noted in his study of O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy “The Glamour of Grammar”, Bella must have seemed “successfully studious and accomplished in ‘high’ culture and the arts” in comparison to her poorly educated brother who’d had to leave school at 14 because of the family’s declining fortunes. Of all of the five O’Casey siblings, Bella looked set to realize “the upward aspirations of the Caseys”. But her story turned out to be different – read what happened next in “The Rising of Bella Casey”, Brandon Press, due on September 16. See http://www.o’brien.ie

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