Elizabeth Hamilton, An Irish Childhood

Abstract

Elizabeth Hamilton was born into a landed Protestant Wicklow family in 1906. Her early years were dominated by two pivotal events that shaped both her life and her narrative recapitulation of it. While she was still young, her father resigned his commission in the British army to take up dairy farming, but when the enterprise failed he was persuaded to sell Mount John, the family’s Georgian mansion, and emigrate to Florida. The move proved disastrous, forcing the family to return within six months, not to Ireland but to England, where her father rejoined his regiment. For Elizabeth, the loss of Mount John and the leaving of Ireland represented an abrupt expulsion from a childhood idyll that she transmutes in her writings into an emblem of permanent exile: ‘I was banished from Eden. An angel with a flaming sword was barring the way. That was how it seemed to me. And, in a sense, I suppose, from that day on I was trying to find my way back.’¹ The biblical imagery here hints at the second formative turning-point in Hamilton’s life: her conversion to Catholicism in her early twenties, while studying at London University. In a late work, I Stay in the Church (1973), she re-evaluates the reasons for her apostasy, seeing it as an act of parental rebellion rather than a repudiation of her Protestant past: ‘Buried among other motives, as I now see it, was a desire for retaliation. Through the years I had not wholly forgiven my parents for having left our home in Ireland: my mother for having made the suggestion, my father for having fallen in with it.’²

Illustrated by Norah McGuinness (London: Chatto & Windus, 1963). 212pp.; pp. 74–7; 199–202.