‘Unfailing Unity’: Jessie Louisa Moore Rickard, Great War Ireland and the Italian Risorgimento

Abstract

This article offers a development of traditional approaches to Irish Great War literature which focus on issues of national identity towards a wider transnational field. It investigates two war narratives by Dublin-born Anglo-Irish writer Jessie Louisa Moore Rickard (1876–1963): her 1915 article for New Ireland ‘The Munsters at Rue du Bois’ and her 1918 home front novel The Fire of Green Boughs, both of which contain intertextual references to the Italian Risorgimento (1815–1871), or the unification of the Italian peninsula. By framing her works within the Italian context, Rickard establishes new paradigms of interpretation for both the representations of Ireland in First World War fiction and the Italian Risorgimento in English literature. In her works, Great War Ireland is no longer perceived as an essentially domestic conflict but rather as connected to other events across time and space, inscribing First World War Ireland within a more global context. Representations of the Risorgimento are also expanded in her work. So far, Irish scholarship has established strong links between the Italian struggle for independence and Irish nationalism. Rickard’s work, however, shows that the Risorgimento can also become a model for the Union between Ireland and England.