The legacies of Jennifer Johnston

Cross the soaring Foyle Bridge from the East and take the route to Donegal. Shortly before you cross the border — now completely imperceptible — you will find the grand, imposing gates to a country house. As you descend the drive, the hum of traffic subsides and the years, centuries, roll back. Had it been built a few miles to the west it might, like many others, have been consumed in the vengeful aftermath of 1916. Partition protected it from that, but half a century later its Georgian windows shook to bomb blasts from the city.

That Jennifer Johnston has spent most of her writing career in this place is magnificently, eerily appropriate. She is a daughter of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Yeats was a friend of the family. She met him when she was young, along with O’Casey, Shaw and others who have faded from memory to legend.

Her study is enviably beautiful. The sash window is eight feet in height and beyond it a lawn the size of a meadow slopes down to Brook Hall’s private jetty on the Foyle. Frequently her characters begin their stories at a precipitate angle to the sea or an estuary. They, seem to have their backs to the land and while the expanse of water does not insinuate a desire to leave, it allows for ambivalence: I am of this island but I am able to look beyond its cloying demands.

Even her accent is neither here nor there. The mean is gentrified Englishness, but one can also pick out a south Dublin lilt and sometimes even a slight echo of Maureen O’Hara in her Quiet Man glory. But the shifts are slight and subtle and in no sense contrived. She tells of how in Notting Hill during the 1950s a woman asked her the way to the tube.