Paperback. Limited to 400 copies. 1st edition, stapled pale green illustrated wraps, 22 pages


Francis Stuart (1902-2000) was a prolific Irish writer whose novels have a thrusting modernist iconoclasm. Awarded the highest artistic accolade in Ireland before his death in 2000, his unwillingness to take a clear moral stance with regards to his years spent in Nazi Germany has led to a great deal of controversy.

Francis Stuart was born in Australia to Irish Protestant parents; his father was alcoholic and killed himself when Stuart was an infant. This prompted his mother to return to Ireland and Stuart's childhood was divided between his home in Ireland and boarding school in England.

In 1920 he became a Catholic and married Maud Gonne's daughter, Iseult Gonne. Iseult was seven years older than him and had had a romantic but unsettled life. Maud Gonne's estranged husband John MacBride was executed in 1916 for taking part in the Easter Rising, and Iseult Gonne's own father was the right-wing French politician, Lucien Millevoye, with whom Gonne had had an affair between 1887 and 1899. Because of her complex family situation, Iseult was often passed off as Gonne's niece in conservative circles in Ireland. Iseult grew up in Paris and London, she had been proposed to by William Butler Yeats in 1917 and had a brief affair with Ezra Pound prior to meeting Stuart; this is made ironic by Pound and Stuart's shared belief in the primacy of the artist and the way in which this belief lead Stuart to Nazi Germany and Pound to fascist Italy.

[edit] IRA involvement

Iseult and Stuart had a baby daughter who died in infancy. Perhaps to recover from this tragedy, they travelled for a while in Europe but returned to Ireland as the Irish Civil War began. Unsurprisingly given Gonne's strong opinions, the couple were caught up on the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) side of this fight, Stuart was involved in gun running and was interned after a botched raid.