Moya Cannon

When I was studying for my Leaving Cert in North Donegal, we had one of Jane Austen's novels, Persuasion, as a set text.

And her world seemed very formal, staid and distant.

So I was astonished to learn recently that three of Jane Austen's nieces had actually lived nearby in the village of Vermelten.

So I wrote this poem in response to that.

Jane's World for Sophia Hillen

It was so far from 70s Donegal, the imagined world of Anne Elliot in her genteel drawing room or in a jaunt to Lyme Regis.

15 or 16 year old romantics studying for the Leaving Cert, too young by far to grasp Jane's delicious ironies.

We nevertheless rejoiced for the not so young Anne when her not so young man declared himself at last.

As rain dripped and dried on the classroom window and the Milford bakery van, shelves stacked with sliced pans, plain loaves and cream buns, set off on the five miles to Remelton, then on to Letterkenny, we never imagined that it might chug past the all-too-real graves of Jane's nieces, Cassandra, Louisa and Marianne, daughters of her fortunate, wealthy brother.

And as I replaced the novel on the pile on my desk and pulled out an Irish text which mentioned in passing the landlord Lord George Hill, who enclosed mountain commonage around Gweedore and let it to Scottish sheep farmers, I was inclined to agree with my friend's grandfather, whose own grandmother had been evicted from Glenveigh by Lord George Adair.

Them old landlords, they're flying round the crooks of hell now.

But I didn't know that Lord George Hill, like Anne's Captain Wentworth, had faithfully waited eight years to claim Cassandra as his bride.

Or that she had died in childbirth near Letterkenny.

Or that, as landlords go, he hadn't been the worst of them at all.

such odd interlockings of worlds of fiction and history, of inequality and pain.