Introduction

Kate O’Brien and Mairin Mitchell were Irish writers active in the 1930s. In 1937, both published books – O’Brien’s Farewell Spain and Mitchell’s Storm over Spain – that commented, by way of travel writing, on the Spanish Civil War, by far the most important military and ideological conflict in interwar Europe. In these works, the authors’ nationality is not incidental. Both leave no doubt that they are Irish writers commenting on Spain from an Irish perspective and, implicitly, for an Irish readership. They feature knowing references to Irish and Irish Catholic culture, for example, and the occasional mocking reference to Britain and its people – to English tourists, say, or to the British governance of Gibraltar.

That both Mitchell and O’Brien address an Irish readership does not mean that was the only readership they sought, only that an Irish readership was their primary target. Nonetheless, as Irish writers writing in English, they had the potential to achieve a much wider audience particularly if they could interest a London publisher, as both did (Ruiz Mas 2017). Indeed, as the industry of literature – its publishing houses, agents, journals, critics, commentators and patrons – was vastly more developed in London than in Dublin, Irish writers seeking to make some kind of living from their work, typically needed to succeed outside of Ireland. Kate O’Brien managed this, becoming so sufficiently prominent in British culture that she could be mentioned knowingly in the film Brief Encounter. Mairin Mitchell did not.

By 1937, O’Brien was already a bestselling novelist and many of her writings are still in print. Mitchell, on the other hand, was and would remain a minor literary figure. Indeed, Storm over Spain concludes with her, disillusioned by what she sees as the increasing militarism of her contemporaries, taking her leave of Bloomsbury and the literary mainstream. Mitchell was aware of O’Brien’s book and was concerned it might eclipse her own (as it did). A letter she wrote to the Irish author and veteran republican activist Desmond Ryan in the latter part of 1937 (Mitchell 1937a) reveals something of her anxiety on this matter. O’Brien in turn took note of Mitchell’s book and wrote to her to commend it. Mitchell refers to this, for her, welcome news in a further letter to Ryan dated 23 October 1937 (Mitchell, 1937c). However, there is no indication that O’Brien and Mitchell ever met.

Both authors were writing at a time when Irish nationalism had achieved many of its objectives. An Irish national state (the Irish Free State) had been established in the early 1920s and, although it was not quite the fully sovereign state to which Irish nationalists had aspired, by the close of the decade all mainstream Irish politicians accepted it as a basis from which full sovereignty might be achieved.[1] At the same time, the Free State was a dominion of the British Empire which meant that, in some respects, it continued to be subordinate to Britain. This complicated the task of Irish governments seeking to assert a distinct Irish identity, culturally and politically separate from the former colonial power. The idea of “catching on to Europe” – of travelling, culturally, in step with continental Europe, rather than Britain, is one Kate O’Brien proposes in passing. In an essay on Irish literature, published posthumously, she comments, “We, a little provincial clutter, as might be thought an outsider, have always had the knack – in our religious history as well as in our literary – of catching onto Europe – of by-passing our British conquerors in our thought and reaching out to Spain and France” (cited in Walshe 2006: 60). Mitchell, in Storm over Spain, offers a political version of this when she advises that the fledgling Irish state, as it evolves a foreign policy, should bear in mind that Ireland, in its previous history, was at its most independent when it was also at its most European.[2] Both authors thereby resist insularity. They hope for an Ireland that looks outward, beyond itself and beyond Britain.

For O’Brien, this is a cultural matter. Mitchell, in contrast, while celebrating Irish cultural engagement in Europe, also looks back to political liaisons including to that past when a Jacobite restoration was still actively pursued and Irish Jacobites in exile were part of this ill-fated project. Between them, Mitchell and O’Brien advocate for Ireland a cultural and political detachment from Britain and a corresponding engagement with Europe in the belief that Europe is less hostile, more receptive and, in some respects at least (e.g. religious heritage), less foreign.

A particular difficulty in catching on to Europe in the 1930s was the continent’s political instability. On to what version of Europe should Ireland catch? Liberal democratic, fascist, Communist, Catholic? And in the particular and immediate question of Spain, how should Irish people align? This is the challenge Storm over Spain and Farewell Spain set out to address. In these works, Mitchell and O’Brien make clear where they stand regarding the version of Europe with which they would like Ireland to align. They are ultimately, if critically, supportive of the Spanish Republic, and opposed to the Francoist insurgency. Having adopted this perspective, one of their aims is to steer Irish public opinion towards the besieged Republic and away from Franco, which is where it largely lay.

In setting out their respective anti-Franco case, each author is careful to assert their Irish and Catholic credentials. Indeed, both are explicit in their religious commitment. Mitchell, a Catholic convert, is emphatic on this while O’Brien, who was in fact a fairly lapsed or at least idiosyncratic Catholic (Walshe, 2024), informs the readers of Farewell Spain that she is “Catholic in all my blood” (2006 [1937]: 59). Mittermaier (2015) makes a strong case for interpreting Farewell Spain as a pro-Republic polemic artfully concealed within an innocent travel book. The same could be said of Storm over Spain.

Overview

This paper comprises several sections. First, a summary of the historical and cultural context that informs O’Brien’s and Mitchell’s writings on Spain – i.e. the development of Irish nationalism and an Irish national state arising from cultural differences between Ireland and the former colonial power, the United Kingdom. There follows some detail on O’Brien and Mitchell, focusing on their respective engagement with Irish nationalism. The paper then goes on to look at the ways in which both authors Europeanise their Irishness, then finally considers their participation in the debate on the Spanish Civil War via their travel writings.

Catholicism and Irish Nationalism

Irish nationalism and the Irish national state derive ultimately from enduring cultural differences between Ireland and Britain. The centrality of Catholicism to Irish nationalism from the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth has been widely discussed (e.g. Whyte 1980). In contrast, the development of a specifically British identity, following the union of the English and Scottish kingdoms as the United Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, drew on the shared Protestantism of these two states. Colley (1992) argues that a common, generic Protestantism enabled those of English and Scottish nationality to identify with one another as Britons and, equally important, to differentiate themselves from the majority of continental Europeans as well as from Catholics closer to home. Irish Catholics, for example, a clear majority on the island of Ireland, were not assimilable by a British national state that defined itself as emphatically not Catholic, indeed anti-Catholic, any more than, prior to the Union of 1707, they had been assimilable by the Kingdom of England.[3]

The conquest of Ireland was complete by the late 1600s following which a series of laws – the Penal Laws – was enacted, not simply to exclude Irish Catholics from political and economic participation, but, in the longer term, to displace Irish Catholicism through a combination of assimilation and emigration. The aim was that Ireland would evolve as a literal colony in which a British settler population and those native Irish who assimilated to it would, in time, become the majority. During this period, continental Europe provided a place of permanent or temporary exile where at least some dissenting Irish Catholics could enjoy the rights and privileges denied them at home such as education, capital accumulation, or an elite career in government or the military. This was the primary source of the small Irish diaspora scattered across Spain, France and Austria that so fascinated Mitchell in particular.

In the event, Irish Catholicism proved too large and resilient to be displaced. The planned colonisation unravelled during the century – the eighteenth – in which it had been expected to be completed. Instead, most of the Penal Laws were repealed, the last major barrier being removed in 1829, when a mass-based agitation led by Daniel O’Connell successfully challenged the bar on Catholics becoming members of parliament. One consequence was that Irish Catholics did not become Catholic Britons but instead Irish nationalists seeking self-government. In addition, the eventual Irish national state was one in which the Catholic Church had considerable influence in areas such as education and healthcare and in which Catholic churches, shrines and holidays were an integral and conspicuous part of Irish life. This made Ireland different from Britain, but similar to France, Italy or Spain, and meant that Catholic Europe was to Irish visitors a place less other or alien than it might have been to most English or British (or anglophone) people.

Early in Farewell Spain, O’Brien mentions that, at around the same time she was working as a governess in Bilbao in 1924, an English novelist of her later acquaintance had, by coincidence, been working there too. She does not name him but writes that he did not share her enthusiasm for the city. By her account, he found it both physically unpleasant (he described it as muddy) and psychologically discomfiting – full, he alleged, of worrying passions below the surface. O’Brien, in contrast, was inspired by it to find out more about Spain, to learn Spanish and read Spanish literature. In considering these markedly different reactions to the same place, she attributes them, not to age or gender, but nationality – the Englishman, disdainful and wary of the foreign, the young Irishwoman, feeling some commonality with Bilbao and its people. Significantly, O’Brien writes that she was not simply comfortable in Bilbao, but in some sense at home and keen to make herself fit in all the more.

We know this Englishman only through what O’Brien tells us of him. We do not even know his name. We know nothing of his actual lived experience in Bilbao, or his actual reaction to the city rather than O’Brien’s report of it. What is interesting here is that she is using him, to set up a dichotomy, not simply between O’Brien and this particular English writer, but between Irish people and English people in general. This is something she will do several times in Farewell Spain – when discussing the English travel writer and missionary George Borrow (“that bigoted, honest fellow”, 95) or, as will be considered shortly, English tourists.

O’Brien’s Invented Ireland

O’Brien, in her Irish-set fiction, invents an Irish middle class, implicitly distinct from its English or British counterpart. As Walshe (2006) comments, these “Irish bourgeois families – the Considines, Mulqueens and Lavelles – are natural aristocrats transcending peasant origins effortlessly in the space of one generation”. They have also caught onto Europe, coming across as more culturally akin to the middle class in French or Italian literature than to anything in English writing. Walshe emphasises that this is very much an idealised version of the Irish Catholic middle-class of the time, one that overstates, in particular, its European-ness though possibly not the extent to which peasant – or, more accurately, tenant farmer – origins had been so quickly transcended.[4] In this imagining and idealising of the Catholic middle-class, O’Brien was, Walshe suggests, driven by an “impulse to teach her English readers that Ireland had a civilised and educated bourgeoisie as civilised as any in Europe” and that “all Irish people are not peasants” (40). The result, he proposes, is somewhat unreal, a caste whose Catholicism is sometimes more English than Irish and whose manner more aristocratic than bourgeois. In correcting earlier Anglo-Irish fictions in which the rising Catholic middle-class is typically lampooned (the fate of almost all colonised peoples who begin to step out of their previously assigned place), O’Brien has romanticised her subject exaggerating the European influence. She herself would claim to have been educated at a school, Laurel Hill, run by French nuns. However, although Laurel Hill had been founded by a French religious order and was known locally as the “French school”, there were, in fact, no French nuns on the teaching staff when O’Brien was there. Indeed, the headmistress was an Englishwoman and the school’s goal appears to have been to prepare Irish Catholic girls for life in an Ireland still part of the United Kingdom. The few concessions to Irish nationalism, such as the inclusion of the Irish language on the curriculum, may have been due more to the lobbying of local parents than to the wishes of the school’s management. This aspect of the school may, in part, explain why O’Brien appears to have had relatively little engagement with actual Irish nationalism and to have been minimally influenced by it. This is despite her becoming an adult at a time when Irish nationalism was entering its most militant, revolutionary phase. Through family connections she worked briefly in the Washington office of the Irish republic unilaterally declared in 1919, but the offer of further diplomatic work was rejected (“I am not keen enough on the new government to risk my hand to become its servant”, cited in Walshe 2006: 28). Europe, not Ireland, is her principal inspiration. It is as an England-domiciled author that she writes of her idealised Irish bourgeoisie either at home in Ireland or abroad in Europe, where it can enjoy freedoms denied at home, including romantic extramarital affairs, gay or straight. This would result in two of O’Brien’s novels – Mary Lavelle and The Land of Spices – being banned by the Irish censor. In response, she wondered if Irish Catholicism was the European-style Catholicism she considered authentic, or some version of it addled by its long coexistence with British puritanism. The reasoning here being, presumably, that, while Britain had long banned books on grounds of alleged obscenity, France, for example, had not. Therefore, in banning literature deemed pornographic, Ireland was catching on to Britain rather than Europe. If that were indeed the case, then Irish censorship was a great deal more zealous than its supposed British role model. None of O’Brien’s books were suppressed by British censors.[5]

All in all, O’Brien emerges from Walshe’s critical biography as something of a contradiction. Irish but domiciled in Britain and supportive of the Spanish Republic yet capable of remarkable snobbery. (Walshe detects “a contempt for any class other than the civilised Irish middle class, or the European equivalent, and their faithful working class servants”, 26). Nor is her desire to present a positive, post-colonial image of the Irish middle class automatically translated into sympathy for other defeated peoples. Farewell Spain makes no comment on the cultural and political aspirations of the Basques, Catalans or Galicians and displays a marked authorial hostility towards Spain’s Islamic heritage – “I[…]detest all signs of the Moor in Spain” (124).

Mairin Mitchell – Becoming Irish

If Kate O’Brien imagined a Europeanised Irish middle-class, Mairin Mitchell reimagined herself as a peripatetic Irish writer, shabby genteel/bourgeois bohemian, as comfortable in and as knowledgeable of Europe as she was of the Ireland from which she alleged she had emerged. Mitchell had, in fact, been born Marian Houghton Mitchell in England in 1895 to an Anglo-Irish father, Thomas Houghton Mitchell, and an English mother, Gertrude Pease. Her father’s background – the Mitchell family had arrived with Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century and thereafter formed part of the colonial elite – his rise through the degrees of freemasonry, and his willingness to relocate himself to England at a time when Irish Home Rule appeared imminent, all suggest that he was not a nationalist. And Mitchell, by her education (private school then Bedford College, London), seems to have been intended for a conventional, English middle-class life. Instead, however, she re-made herself – from Protestant to Catholic, and from British to Irish, the latter to the extent of learning Irish and Gaelicising her name, from Marion to Mairin Mitchell by way of an interim Máirín Ní Mhaol Mhicéil. The setting for this transformation was London in the 1910s where she took up with a cosmopolitan leftist fringe comprising anarchists, socialists, feminists, Irish republicans and nationalists. Her journey into Irishness, into Catholicism, and into Irish republicanism was also a journey into a niche but international counterculture. Though she had described herself in a 1933 letter to Desmond Ryan as “rather conventionally [Irish] republican”, her style of republicanism was, in fact, idiosyncratic and distinctive, more Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington than Padraig Pearse, and more pacifist than militarist (Mitchell 1933). Her Catholicism, which was both liberal and mystical, was similarly distinctive, leading her to favour what she saw as the modest church of the Basque country over its more ostentatious Spanish sister and being openly critical of the latter at a time when much Catholic opinion was supportive. This reflects a general tendency to stand aside from the mainstream. Stating, in Storm over Spain, what were, during her transformative time in London, her “three greatest book treasures” (Mitchell 1937b: 32) she lists Labour in Irish History by James Connolly, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Gleanings in Buddha Fields – Studies of Hand and Soul in the Far East by Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek Anglo-Irishman who had assimilated into Japanese culture and become perhaps the greatest populariser of its literature in the west. Two mavericks, plus an author, Hardy, chosen for his novel of a maverick life, a text so ahead of its time that it diminished his public standing and put an end to his career as a novelist. Of the three, Hearn comes closest to Mitchell herself, for having adopted another culture and become an expert on it. In fact, Mitchell did this on at least two occasions and with regard to two cultures – that of Ireland and that of Spain.

O’Brien and Mitchell on Spain

O’Brien began writing Farewell Spain in October 1936, a few months after the start of the Spanish Civil War and had completed it by early 1937, at which time it still seemed entirely possible that the Spanish government might win. This book, in which O’Brien makes explicit her support for the Republic, may have been the reason she was prohibited from entering Spain for two decades (Walshe 2006). In form, Farewell Spain appears to recount a single, continuous journey. In reality, the work draws on various trips undertaken by its author in the period 1924-35 including her time in Bilbao. (Neither Andalusia nor Catalonia feature in the text as O’Brien had not visited these regions at the time the book was written). O’Brien makes no secret of this artifice – this is travel writing with irony and, as will be argued shortly, a political agenda.

Storm over Spain is also something of an invention. In 1937, the year it was published, publisher interest in Spain was inevitably focused on the Civil War and Storm over Spain, which had been conceived as a memoir of a journey through southern Spain in April-May 1936 – i.e. the immediate pre-Civil War period – was duly reworked to make it a book about the war and thereby publishable. The revised text adds war commentary drawn largely from London anarchist sources, and some material from a visit to the Basque country undertaken by Mitchell in the early 1930s. It also suggests that the author’s stay in Spain extended to October 1936, thus taking in the first months of the conflict. This was not the case. A letter to Liam Ryan written the day of her return home is dated 10 May 1936, two months before the start of the conflict. She writes that “travelling in Spain has been a rich experience. The poverty in the south has left sad impressions. Actually, there was some danger on this trip and I found the Irish nuns in Seville no longer in their habits”, (Mitchell 1936a).

Perhaps inevitably, it is Mitchell’s pre-war material that makes the more interesting and valuable part of her book. Her sense at the time was that a coup was coming, but from the left. One portent of this, she believed, was the graffito she writes of having seen many places she visited – “bold drawings of a figure swinging from a gallows. An inscription told us that this […] would be the fate of the man who would not vote for the [Popular] Front” (192-193). Or the wildcat strikes. “No one knew from day to day what service would be suspended next”, she writes, “so a general feeling of insecurity resulted, which was of course just what the promoters of these guerrilla strikes wanted” (168). Mitchell’s reworking of the text to meet publisher and market expectations does not detract from the characterful travel writing that is the book’s core and the basis for its enduring value. These reworkings were, moreover, to no commercial gain. Storm over Spain was, in the words of its publisher Fredric Warburg, a “flop”. Warburg (1959: 142) comments that he had banked on Mitchell’s pacifist account of the war finding a readership just as he had gambled on another left-field take on the conflict, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. (Orwell’s book, too, was a failure on publication but has become subsequently the biggest selling English-language text on the war). Mitchell herself slipped quickly into greater obscurity. Storm over Spain ends with her, in effect, resigning from literary London and it is to Orwell’s positive review in Time and Tide (Orwell [1937] 1998a) that book and author owe what reputation they have. This is regrettable since Mitchell is no superficial commentator. As Goldstone (2020) notes, her fluency in Spanish and her awareness of the detail of Spanish history makes her better placed than many to describe and discuss the Spanish conflict (Orwell say, who by his own admission, had an ability in Spanish he describes as “bad” and, later, “villainous”). Mitchell herself seems to have sensed, if not her own fitness to write about Spain, then the shortcomings of others with higher profile and greater sway. “One could envy those people”, she writes in Storm over Spain, “who, knowing not a word of Spanish, went to Spain for two or three weeks during the war, and then came back and wrote articles or books in which they settled the question not only of Spain, but of Europe. But it happened that these simplifications were not nearly so apparent to Spaniards themselves, most of whom remained the despair of foreign doctrinaire writers” (13).

Catching on to Europe

At the start of Farewell Spain, O’Brien recalls being in a café in Santander watching some English tourists, whom she criticises unsparingly. They are wage workers, she decides, “thirteen day trippers” (25), in Spain for their annual two-week holiday. And having thus placed them socio-economically, she proceeds to infer and imagine their banality. This is O’Brien addressing her idealised Irish middle class – these English visitors, they are not like us, they do not react to Spain as we Irish might. They take their knowledge of the country from a poster and, expecting the warm south, wind up instead in somewhere with approximately the same climate as – O’Brien’s comparison – County Kerry. Unadventurous, they need a guide to shepherd them around. In contrast, an Irish couple is treated with greater authorial kindness. O’Brien recalls that they bought a set of overalls for their son back home and wonders, now, if they regret that purchase, overalls having since become associated with the “Army in Overalls”, the workers’ militias that rose spontaneously and, for a time, successfully in opposition to Franco. While O’Brien’s view may be that Ireland and the Irish are more receptive to Spain than are Britain and its people, when it comes to the Civil War, Ireland, or most of it, is very much on the wrong side. It is O’Brien’s mission to fix this. If Ireland is to catch on to Europe, it will be to the right side of it, which is to say, the left.

Mitchell’s Storm over Spain also opens in a café, the Hungarian Café Sarda in Soho where Mitchell and her Hungarian friend Tinka Hérányi meet a Spanish journalist. He advises them that, if they wish to travel to Spain, they had better hurry because the situation there is deteriorating. He warns that soon, and for a long time to come, the country will be off-limits to visitors. It is a scene that neatly sets up the author as knowledgeable and cosmopolitan. Of serious purpose, too, since she intends travelling to Spain in order to chase up what she calls “Irish tracks”, traces of those Irish people who in the past connected with Europe the better to escape Ireland, post-conquest. The exiled remnants of Irish Jacobite society, for example, such as Richard Wall of Coolnamuck who had a military and political career in Spain and took an interest in restoring the Alhambra, or Leopoldo O’Donnell, who was ennobled as Duke of Tetuán for services to the state under the second Isabella. However, Mitchell also draws more contemporary and politically charged parallels between Ireland’s past and the Spain she is visiting. In describing the country’s land question, for example, and the relatively modest measures the Republic has taken to address it, she notes the similarities with the earlier land agitation in Ireland. Likewise, the small nation nationalisms of Catalonia and the Basque Country that held no interest for O’Brien receive considerable attention from Mitchell, who notes their similarity to Irish nationalism. Such parallels are emphasised through the quotations that open the relevant chapters in Storm over Spain such as James Connolly’s “we only want the earth” for the land question chapter and some lines from Moirín Ní Shionnaigh for the chapter on the Basques:

That they ride by

In gold and glittering mail

Trampling in blood and mire

My fields, once green,

No crying for them will be heard

But the screaming of vultures (quoted Mitchell, 1937b: 204).

On both these issues – land ownership and small nation nationalism – Mitchell advises that the Republic is at least trying to improve things. The insurgents, in contrast, have no sympathy for the tenant farmers or the landless poor or the marginalised nationalities, and no policy beyond repression. So how, asks Mitchell, can Irish people, by supporting Franco, place themselves squarely in opposition to national liberationists and land activists so similar to their Irish counterparts. Though Mitchell has an answer to this apparent puzzle (Irish Franco-supporters wish, primarily, to defend the church against a government variously perceived as secular, anticlerical and Communist) the fact that she raises the matter at all is surely intended to make some Irish readers reconsider.

There are few Irish tracks of any kind in O’Brien aside from her according Irish people an unevidenced role in the development of Spanish civilisation. While the Spanish were otherwise engaged in the Reconquista, she claims, Irish pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela brought to the country their “knowledge of lettering and illumination” (71). But no attempt is made to equate the Irish experience of land agitation and national liberation with aspects of the situation in Spain. This is likely because O’Brien, while identifying as Irish, seems to have had little interest in the politics or history of Irish nationalism or in the aspirant nationalisms of the Basques and others.

A more marked similarity between the two books is in something more commonplace – their reaction to tourists. Mitchell shares something of O’Brien’s hostility although her tourists are noticeably better off than those O’Brien described. Her aversion to what would today be called “conflict tourists” has already been noted, but some more conventional tourists also receive short shrift in Storm over Spain. This is the group of British tourists that interrupts her stay at a pension in La Caleta – a place suited for “tired workers” (25) now taken over by “people who seemed apart from our world” (26). Ignorant of Spain these apparent bright young things are nonetheless happy to pronounce and speculate on what is happening there. According to Mitchell, a few children in Malaga, marching with sticks and red banners, sets them imagining that a revolution is underway and that it will leave them stranded unless they can “get a boat to Gib”. Gibraltar – “Gib” – itself receives a mixed review from Mitchell, in which she comments wryly on British rule there: “There is one thing that all Englishmen – that most complex of creatures – share and that is their sense of possession. An Englishman’s home is his castle, but it is so often someone else’s castle” (Mitchell 1937b: 162).

Commentary like this would certainly have raised a smile among Irish readers and helps place Mitchell’s text as a distinctly Irish account of Spain and its conflict. Her scorn for her fellow residents at the La Caleta pension could, in isolation, be read as working class or socialistic disapproval or even an older generation aghast at the new. But the later remarks on Gibraltar and the general presentation of Storm over Spain with its Irish references, epigraphs (almost every chapter opens with a quotation from an Irish writer or activist), and dedicatee (Liam Ryan, a journalist and left-leaning Irish nationalist) make clear that all this is an Irish reaction to the situation in Spain.[6]

The Spanish Civil War in Ireland

Although the Irish Government was formally neutral between the two sides in the Spanish Civil War, Irish public opinion was, as noted, largely on the side of Franco and would remain so for several decades. A minority of Irish people, mainly on the left, supported the Republic but the mainstream was against it, often vehemently so. This was principally because the Spanish Republic, especially after the 1936 election, which returned the Popular Front, was seen as both hostile to the Catholic Church and, not simply left of centre, but formally Communist and under direction from Moscow. The Popular Front’s secularising ambitions were interpreted as anti-clerical, if not Bolshevik, and the Republic was perceived as either indifferent to the destruction of church property or as having actively connived in it. In addition, claims that the Popular Front had stolen the election through fraud were widely accepted. This was an image of the Republic promoted through sermons (at a time when church attendance in Ireland was near universal), specialist religious periodicals, and the mainstream print media.

These clerical denunciations of the Republic and its Irish supporters meant that many of the latter were obliged to keep a low profile at home. Mitchell, writing to Desmond Ryan on 30 September 1936, remarks that something she had written on Spain that was so mildly left as to be “pale pink” nonetheless incensed a priest to the extent that he had expressed a wish to drown her. As a result, she claimed, Ireland Today, the left-leaning periodical in which the offending piece of writing had appeared, had advised her it would not publish anything further of hers on Spain, not until James Hogan (a conservative academic) had published something on the same subject by way of counter-balance (Mitchell 1936b).[7]

Such was the Irish consensus on Spain that both Farewell Spain and Storm over Spain implicitly set out to challenge. O’Brien, for example, is unambiguous in her support for the Republic and its war effort: “I am not a Communist but I believe in the Spanish Republic and its constitution, and I believe in that Republic’s absolute right to defend itself against military juntas, the Moors and all interfering doctrinaires and mercenaries” (127). She sees the Republican constitution of 1931 as reasonable and Franco, in contrast, as someone aiming openly at “the murder of every democratic principle” (221). St Teresa of Avila, she speculates, would not have disapproved of the Republic’s constitution.

This is clearly pitched, in particular, at an Irish readership accustomed to seeing the Spanish Republic depicted as Communist, or close enough. O’Brien, by way of correction, writes that Spain is not now Communist and is unlikely in the future to adopt the Soviet form of Communism. Rather there is a politics of social justice ongoing in Spain that, while it has affinities with Communism and socialism, is also close to aspects of Catholic teaching. This, not the Soviet model, is what the Republic espouses. A perceptive, and intellectually robust Catholic like the great Teresa would see this straightaway.

Mitchell, in Storm over Spain, goes further than O’Brien in offering evidence that Catholicism and something close to communism are not necessarily alien. If, as she alleges, the Jesuit Order owned a third of all the land in Spain – a contention that drew criticism from the academic, hispanophile and author Edgar Allison Peers[8] – then the same Jesuit Order, in the 1600s, founded “among the Indians of Paraguay a system as nearly communistic as that attempted by the Bolsheviks in Russia” (Mitchell 1937b: 53).

Mitchell goes on to describe how, more recently, the Basques provide an example of a Catholic nation that has thrown its support behind the Republic. Important here is that the Basque church is a modest, understated church, neither rich nor hand in glove with the politically powerful. This contrasts with the Spanish church which she suggests has brought at least some of its troubles on itself: “Had the Church as a whole in Spain been the friend of the poor, had the Catholic priests in general supported the social advancement of the toiling masses, it seems unlikely that the Church would have suffered in the Civil War as they did” (Mitchell 1937b: 55).

Mitchell is also keen to distinguish Communism, of which she is strongly critical, from anarchism, towards which she had been long sympathetic. She presents the anarchists positively, emphasising their educational work and opposition to militarism while dissociating them from disreputable actions such as church-burning. The latter she sees as the response of individuals who style themselves anarchists rather than part of any coordinated campaign by anarchists proper.

Both Mitchell and O’Brien offer anecdotes in which clerics – a nun in Mitchell’s book and a priest in O’Brien’s – are harassed by loutish supporters of the Spanish Republic but end up getting the better of them. In Storm over Spain, Mitchell’s nun, having been thrown to the ground, responds by slapping her assailant in the face. In Farewell Spain, O’Brien recalls a priest she met in Santillana del Mar (a place that she says, “lost all interest in the vulgar world about two hundred years ago”, 54) pacing in front of a café waiting for a bus and being first barracked then almost assaulted by the customers. O’Brien writes: “I think that he was just manly, and in the centre of his heart perhaps, if not in his nerves, unafraid of life or death. Anyway, it was an interesting round, and went on points to the church” (58).

Elsewhere in Farewell Spain, O’Brien writes fondly of the church of the Colegiata, while suggesting that it comes from an earlier and more admirable Catholicism than that of more recent times. She dismisses as “utilitarian dullards” those on the government side who wish to transform centuries old religious buildings into markets or parking lots. As with Mitchell, O’Brien here allies not so much with the mainstream Spanish church as with an alternative and older (and perhaps romanticised) version of it.

Conclusions

In their respective writings on the Spanish Civil War, both Mitchell and O’Brien set out to influence Irish opinion on that conflict. They subtly challenge Ireland’s prevailing sentiment, which was pro-Franco, in the hope of moving it in towards the Popular Front and the Republic. To this end, they emphasise their own Irish and Catholic credentials, including by drawing parallels between the concerns of Ireland and those of Republican Spain (e.g. the land question), by noting where Catholicism and militant support for the Republic have come together (e.g. the Basque Nationalists in Storm over Spain), and that there are aspects of Catholic social policy, or variations of it, that are anarchic or communistic. Mitchell can therefore point to the Basques as an example of a people who are both Catholic and anti-Franco and she and O’Brien alike try to enlist prominent Catholics posthumously on the anti-Franco side – respectively, the Jesuits of Paraguay and Teresa of Avila.

If changing Irish minds on which side to support in the Spanish Civil War was their immediate aim, a necessary stage to the longer-term goal of catching on, not just to Europe, but to a progressive version of it, Mitchell and O’Brien were unsuccessful. Irish sympathy for Franco lasted into the 1960s and was by no means completely exhausted by the time of the dictator’s death in 1975. The transformation in Irish opinion of the Spanish Civil War, from overwhelmingly pro-Franco to near universal support for the Republic came slowly and in response to wider changes such as the shift in Catholic thinking in the 1960s and the cultural prevalence of the anti-Franco narrative in both the English-speaking world and in Spain itself following the restoration of democracy at the end of the 1970s. The relatively small number of active Irish opponents of Franco such as Peadar O’Donnell and Charles Donnelly, who were largely disowned in their time, have been rehabilitated and their views on the conflict given a higher profile than was the case when they were first published (notably in McLoughlin and O’Connor, 2020). Farewell Spain has been similarly revaluated but, perhaps surprisingly, Mitchell’s Storm over Spain has been thus far largely overlooked.

Notes

[1] The Free State would become a de facto republic via its 1937 Constitution. Farewell Spain was already published, and Storm over Spain largely written, some months before this new Constitution was published and put to referendum (June 1937).

[2] Mitchell’s three travel books – Traveller in Time (1935), Storm over Spain (1937) and Back to England ([1940] 1942) – are replete with references to Irish people who have had distinguished careers in Continental Europe, from the Jacobite diaspora onwards. The intention seems, in part at least, to alert readers to this European heritage, to a Europe that has, in the past, been a place where Irish lives can be lived freely and to the full, away from colonial restrictions. When, in the 1940s, Mitchell moved from this quasi-Europeanism to a kind of Atlanticism (Mitchell 1941), she began to focus on a different Irish history, an alleged Irish maritime tradition (Mitchell 1943).

[3] Colley notes that the imperial project and the military basis that made it possible also contributed to the emergence of a supranational British identity. Consequently, while England and Britain are often conflated, it is rare for this to be the case when speaking of empire and armed forces – the British Empire, the British Army.

[4] O’Brien’s own family history is evidence of the turnaround in Irish Catholic circumstances in the half century before her birth in Limerick in 1897. Her father, Thomas Frazer O’Brien, had been born a few years after the Famine, in 1853, the child of a dispossessed tenant farmer. In time, however, he would become a successful and prosperous horse dealer, and O’Brien herself grew up in comfortable circumstances with no shortage of life chances.

[5] Irish censorship, like British censorship, could be easily by-passed by those determined to do so and with minimal risk. Books that had escaped British but not Irish censorship could be purchased in the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, whether directly, through contacts, or by mail order.

[6] It is therefore particularly surprising that Orwell, in reviewing Storm over Spain, was keenly aware of its author’s Catholicism but did not note her nationality (Orwell 1998b [1937]).

[7] Hogan, a conventional, Catholic conservative, was no fascist and was, in fact, strongly opposed to fascism in Ireland and elsewhere.

[8] Mitchell refers to this in a letter to Desmond Ryan, 24 February 1938.