Alice Stopford Green

Life
1847-1929; b. Kells, Co. Meath; ed. at home; dg. Archdeacon Stopford (d. 1874); moved to London at his death, m. pioneering social historian John Richard Green, with whom she collaborated; issued on her own account Town Life in the Fifteenth Century (1894); abandoned English history for Irish at death of husband and issued The Making of Ireland and its Undoing 1200-1600, attacked by English reviewers for alleged inaccuracy; Irish Nationality (1911), very popular in Ireland; closely concerned with Howth gun-running, her home in London being the scene where plans were laid among Roger Casement, Bulmer Hobson, Darrell Figgis, and others; moved after 1916 to 90 St. Stephen’s Green, making it an intellectual centre; Ourselves Alone in Ulster (Dublin 1918), Do., rep. in new. edn. with notes (1918) attacked Carson’s policy; participated in Treaty talks, 1921; nominated Irish Senate, 1922; contrib. the Catholic Bulletin in the 1920s; A History of the Irish State to 1014 (London 1925), based on questionable historiography of ninth century annals; d. Dublin; the Alice Stopford-Green Papers are held in the NLI; presented casket to Senate for its Constitution. JMC DNB DIB DIW DIH OCIL FDA

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Works
The Making of Ireland and its Undoing 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1908), Do., 2nd edn., with add. Appendix (1909); another edn. (London: Macmillan 1924), 573pp.; Ourselves Alone in Ulster (1918) [var. 1915]

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Criticism

  • R. B. McDowell, Alice Stopford-Green: A Passionate Historian (Dublin: Allen Figgis & Co. 1967), 116pp.;
  • Léon Ó Bróin, Protestant Nationalists in Revolutionary Ireland, The Stopford Connection (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985), 234pp;
  • Charlotte O’Conor Eccles, ‘Some Irishwomen in London,’ in Donohue, 54 (1905) [cited in Anne Brady, Women in Ireland (1988)];
  • S. Holton, ‘Gender Difference, National Identity and Professing History: the Case of Alice Stopford Green’, in History Workshop Journal , Vol. 53, No. 1 ([Univ. of Adelaide] 2002), pp.118-27.

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Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991): selects no part of her works, but cites in a foot-note (Vol. 3, ftn 9, 497) as best-known works, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing (1908), and the pamphlet Ourselves Alone and [sic] Ulster (1918).

Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); gives extract from Mrs. J. R. Green, Town Life in the 15th c. [1894]. See also Irish Book Lover, 4, 7; Also ‘A Castle at Ardglass’ [non-title excerpt from The Old Irish World], in Sophia Hillan King and Sean MacMahon, eds., Hope and History: Eyewitness Accounts of life in Twentieth-Century Ulster (Belfast: Friar’s Bush Press 1996), pp.23-25.

Cathach Book. (Cat. 12) lists The Making of Ireland and Its Undoing 1200-1600 (London: Macmillan 1908), Do., with Appendix to 2nd edn. (1909); [Whelan 32; Hyland 214, 220]; Ourselves Alone in Ulster (1918).

Emerald Isle Books (1997) lists The Making of Ireland [&c.] (London: Macmillan 1908), 511pp. [Commerce, Trade, Learning, the Bards and Brehons, &c.] another edn. (Macmillan 1924), 573pp. [Part I: Trade and Industries, pp.1-203; Pt. II: Education and Learning, pp.235-557]

Belfast Public Library holds no fiction; hist. works incl. Fragments (1920); History of the Irish State to 1014 (1925); Irish Nationality ([1912]; Loyalty and Disloyalty, what it means in Ireland (n.d.); The Old Irish World (1912); Ourselves Alone in Ulster (1918) [var?1915, Cathach Bks. Cat. 12]. MORRIS holds History of the Irish State (1925) 437p.; Irish National Tradition (1917) 24p.; Irish Nationality (1919) 256p.


Irish Nationality (1912), a survey of early Irish ‘nationhood,’ bears the dedication ‘To the Irish Dead.’ It includes reference to the fourfold division centred where ‘all meet in the middle of the island, at the Hill of Usnech, where the Stone of Division still stands.’ Speaks of ‘the unchanging intention - the taking of Irish land,’ and ends with an aspiration towards ‘the natural union [which] approaches the Irish nation.’ Her bibliography lists Irish histories, characterising Bagwell as writing from ‘the viewpoint of the English settler [who regards] the natives as inferior, devoid of organisation or civilisation.’

Romantic charm: Alice Stopford Green comments on the derogatory view of Irish topography in C. L. Falkiner’s Essays Relating to Ireland, &c. (1909): ‘How was it that these Englishmen left none of their "romantic charm" there? What strange history lies hidden behind this saying?’ (‘The Way of History’, in The Old Irish World, Gill, 1912, p.16; cited in Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Field Day/Cork UP 1996, p.5.)

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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)