Leland Bardwell

Works
Poetry, The Mad Cyclist (Dublin: New Writers Press 1970), 20pp. [ltd. edn. 300]; The Fly and the Bed Bug (Dublin: Beaver Row Press 1984), 48pp.; Dostoevsky’s Grave: Selected Poems (Dublin: Daedalus 1991), 69pp.; The White Beach: New and Selected Poems, 1960-1998 (Knockevin: Salmon Publishing 1998), 115pp.; The Noise of Masonry Settling (Dublin: Dedalus Press 2006), 76pp.

Novels, Girl on a Bicycle: A Novel (Dublin: Irish Writers Co-operative Press 1977), 160pp.; That London Winter (Dublin: Irish Writers Co-operative Press 1981), 183pp.; The House (Brandon Press 1984; rep. 2006), 156pp.; There We Have Been (Dublin: Attic Press 1989, 1990), 96pp.; Mother to a Stranger (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2002), 186pp. Memoir, A Restless Life (2008)

Short stories, Different Kinds of Love (Dublin: Attic Press 1987), 121pp., trans. into German by Ilse Bessen Berger (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein 1991).

Plays, Thursday; Open Ended Prescription [both unpublished] ; radio plays, The Revenge of Constance; Just Another Killing; also a musical on Edith Piaf.

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Commentary
David Norris, ‘Imaginative Response versus Authority: A Theme of the Anglo-Irish Short Story’, in Terence Brown & Patrick Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979), briefly notes of The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross that ‘it is by no means so accurate, complete or convincing an account of protestant, Anglo-Irish life as, for example, Leland Bardwell’s Girl on a Bicycle [1977].’ (p.49.)

Sue Leonard, review of Leland Bardwell, Mother to a Stranger (Belfast: Blackstaff Press), 192pp., in which a contented middle age couple are confronted by the undisclosed early child of the wife, come back in his thirties in search of his birth-mother. Leonard writes with some indignation at the publisher’s promise of an ‘exceptional novel about the devastating power of secrets’: ‘If only Leland had made a plan [...] Leland has already published four novels, so should surely understand her craft by now? It’s not that she can’t write. There is some poetic thoughtful writing in the novel, but it gers drowned in the torrent of half-formed ideas and morass of four-letter words.’ (Books Ireland, Summer 2002, p.165.)

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Mary Leland, review of Leland Bardwell, Mother to a Stranger, review in The Irish Times (8 June 2002), Weekend: Nan, a concert pianist, and Jim, a small farmer in a very elective way, have to come to terms with the arrival of Nan’s only child, born 30 years earlier in a home for unmarried mothers in London; while Nan makes an emotional tiphead of her life with Jim, Jim retreats to the pub; ‘Bardwell is marvellous at this: as the marriage emerges as fundamentally barren so the farming life reveals the contradictory relationships between people force together by a mixture of dependence and scorn.’ Further, ‘The intimacy of Bardwell’s grip on the reader cannot be rejected; her techniques of displacement and her insinuations of something to hope for have an almost theatrical quality.’

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J. Ardle McArdle, review of The House [rep. edn.], in Books Ireland (Oct. 2007): ‘In The House, the Stewarts, a Protestant family living near Killiney, are not happy. The prodigal (in his parents’ eyes) son, Cedric, a philandering historian plagued by his non-relationship with his father and his hatred of his mother, returns physically to see his fatherwho is dying and mentally to relive the ups and downs of being part of a snobbish, mentally besieged family in an alien Catholic world. In spite of the title, this is not a run of the mill Big House story of impoverished eccentricity but a meticulously drafted exposure of human inability to cope with a new world, which obliges the reader to criticise and to pity at the same time. If there are heroes in the book, they are the quiet ones, Cedric’s father, a hard working solicitor making out deeds and wills for old Protestant ladies living in Glenageary or Greystones and Theresa, the Catholic maid, who was Cedric’s lover. Cedric, himself damaged goods, writes to her from Malaya after a suicide attempt [quotes]: "I should never have done what I did to you. I gave you hope. People like you and me shouldn’t have hope. My father is the only hero. He stayed at home and worked. Every day. Punctual. Fair. Will you look after him for me? He never made the mistake of giving people hope." / Leland Bardwell’s prose has never been so precise and so cutting. Not a word is superfluous and yet everything is covered.’ [Quotes as infra; end] (p.214.)

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[Shirley Kelly,] ‘I Never Planned to Write a Memoir’ [interview-article], in Books Ireland (Sept. 2008), gives account of her early life, viz., 1928- [née Leland Hone]; b. in India of Anglo-Irish parents, her father being employed on the railways; spent her childhood in the crumbling family home at Leixlip, Co. Kildare [‘the descendency’]; her father’s furniture factory burnt to the ground; educated at first by a maiden aunt at home, later travelling with her to other gentry houses where she was taught with other children; solitary child, her siblings being sent to boarding-school; read novels from penny library and played piano in empty wing of house; ignored by her social-climbing mother, who told her she was a ‘mistake’; formed friendship with a succession of house-maids; once attacked her mother with a pitchfork; ate broken glass in frustration; sent to Alexandra College at 12; befriended the only Catholic girl there; excelled at hockey and piano, winning prizes for poetry and fiction; formed ambition to be a concert pianist; her mother died in 1941; fell in love with a first cousin of her father (Christopher Cooper); became pregnant by another man; travelled to English ‘to help with the war effort’; worked in Birmingham factory and gave up son for adoption (‘I’ve known girls who killed themselves when they discovered they were pregnant’); spent remainder of wartime in London; near escape in air-raid; began writing for magazines, unsuccessfully; moved in Scotland, 1945; joined alternative teaching community; met her husband Michael, though still in love with Cooper; returned to Ireland and lived life of self-sufficiency in Kilkenny; had twins; family moved to Cambridgeshire, once again living in a cottage; became increasingly estranged; commenced affair with his br. Brian; moved with Brian to Paris, leaving the twins in a London nursery; returned pregnant to London; became friendly with Anthony Cronin and Patrick Kavanagh, frequenting Soho; her flat a hangout for artists (‘a crescendo of madness ... hectic, funny, wonderful, painful; all those emotions stretched the limits’); became pregnant with playboy Finton McLachlan, and suffered botched abortion; back in Dublin in 1960; children living with their father in England; basement flat in Leeson St., with dg. Jacky and son Nicholas; Finton occasionally visiting; contrib. reviews to Hibernia; met Macdara Woods, Paul Durcan, Michael Hartnett and others, often in McDaids and the Bailey; poetry published in Arena (‘more and more poems came tumbling out, one after another, like sheep going through the gap’); wrote Girl on a Bicycle; six children; Finton stealing money from her; moved to Hatch St., 1970; on landlady selling up, moved to Tallaght housing estate; rented a house at Annaghmakerrig; now lives alone in northwest Sligo; issued memoir, A Restless Life. (p.171.)

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Quotations
The House (rep. edn. 2007): ‘The door opens and Maria [Cedric’s sister] enters, dressed in riding clothes. She, all bustle and worry, is at the mercy as usual of her freedom. A strange paradox. She was free because she was unfree. She had no choice. Her life was a blueprint of the horsey girl who turns into a horsey woman. I think I said earlier that she might have been a suffragette if she had been born a little sooner. But as it was, her mind was padlocked behind generations of stiff Protestant notions, prim as a governess yet she would never even achieve that status. She’d disapproved of everything. She would spend her life waiting from Monday to Thursday for the weekly meet of the Bray Harriers. During the weekend she read what we used to slay as middle-brow books, but the romance in them, or rather the effect of the romance in them, was something she hid within herself. I pitied her more than Jess. Especially afterwards when I discovered that she secretly painted stacks of water-colours, mostly views of the bay, which were tinted with nostalgia that would break your heart were you to see them today. So why could she not share any of this agony with the rest of us? For the same reason, I suppose, that we were all cut off from each other; like points in a field [.]’.

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References
Anthologies: Edmund Lenihan, ed., Ferocious Irish Women (Cork: Mercier 1991) and Katie Donovan, A. N. Jeffares, and Brendan Kennelly, eds., Ireland’s Women (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1994).

The House (1984) concerns Cedric Stewart who returns to post-WWII Killiney to visit his dying father; illustrates conservatism of Protestant society and explores personal relationships with others incl. a Catholic housekeeper. (Books Ireland, “First Flush”.)

COPAC lists Different Kinds of Love (1987); Dostoevsky’s Grave: Selected Poems (1991); The Fly and the Bedbug (1984); Girl on a Bicycle: a novel (1977); The House (1984); The Mad Cyclist (1970); Mother to a Stranger (2002); That London Winter (1981); There We Have Been (1989); The White Beach: New and Selected Poems 1960-1998 (1998); Ed., Borderlines: Poems by South Ulster Youth (1989); Borderlines 2: Poems by Young People in the Border Area (1994); Borderlines 3: poems by young people in the Irish border region (2000)

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