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Subject Index A-B
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Subject Index C-F
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Subject Index G-K
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Subject Index L-O
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Subject Index P-Z
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20th Century Ireland - Francis Stuart (1902-2000)
Francis Stuart was born in Australia. At the age of two he was sent to Ireland to live with relatives in County Antrim and was educated at Rugby School, England. At eighteen he eloped with Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne. During the Irish Civil War Stuart fought on the republican side and was imprisoned by the Free State in the Hare Park Internment Camp and in the Curragh where he went on hunger-strike.
Following his release he published his first poetry collection We Have Kept the Faith (1923) which won him immediate critical acclaim and the praise of W.B.Yeats. During the 1920's and 30's Stuart kept a farm in County Wicklow. His first novel Women and God was published in 1931. He published a further four novels before he went to Germany as a English lecturer in the University of Berlin in 1940, where he experienced, in his own words, 'the war from the centre'. Stuart was the only English language writer to witness the fall of Berlin in 1945, an experience he later recounted in his novel Redemption (1949).
In November, 1945 Stuart was imprisoned by the allies under suspicion of collaboration with the Nazis, an allegation he always denied. After his release in July, 1946 Stuart lived in Germany, France and England before returning to live permanently in Ireland in 1958 where, in spite of his ostracisation, he continued to write and publish novels and plays. His most acclaimed novel Blacklist, Section H was published in 1971 after which Stuart's literary reputation was steadily reinstated.
Stuart's later works included a philosophical essay The Abandoned Snail-Shell (1988); a second poetry collection Night Pilot (1989) and a novel A Compendium of Lovers (1990). Stuart's poem Ireland was composed in Berlin in 1944 and was first published in The Capuchin Annual, 1944.©
Francis Stuart (1902-2000)