Clair Wills is Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters in the Department of English, Princeton University.
The book's emphasis on the quotidian is introduced with a
nicely-judged autobiographical portrait of Wills's own family,
which describes the rather different experiences of her Irish
mother and English father through the 1940s (they married near the
end of the decade.) Irish neutrality was a radioactive topic in the
Churchill-de Valera years and is still hotly debated now. This
account seems to me the most open- yet clear-minded yet
available—it shows just how fluctuating were the responses of many
people, whether they supported the Allies, the Axis, or neutrality.
Frank Aiken's declared fear that if Ireland were to take sides,
there would first have to be fought another civil war deciding
which side to support rings true, given that for every person who
was likely to support the British, there would be another thinking
that 'England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity.'
*Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland*
When the world descended into war in 1939 a few European countries
remained neutral. Of those, none was more controversial than
Ireland. In That Neutral Island Clair Wills sheds new light on what
it was actually like in Ireland during that time. She examines the
impact of neutrality on everyday life and how the censorship of
Irish newspapers contributed to the feeling of isolation in
Ireland. She also looks at Ireland's role in the Battle of the
Atlantic and whether Ireland really did completely abandon Britain
during the conflict. And she unearths the motivations of the
thousands who left the country to fight in the British forces, and
assesses the reaction of writers like MacNeice and Beckett to Irish
neutrality.
*Belfast Telegraph*
This is a big book: in size, in ambition and in its willingness to
remain even-handed when dealing with a period that usually attracts
lopsided accounts. By and large Wills lets the facts speak for
themselves, covering the 150,000 who volunteered for the British
armed forces but also the scavengers who stripped the corpses of
drowned seamen, and the scam-mongers who then wrote to the
relatives asking for money...This is an authoritative and readable
account. It is also a fine introduction to the nation that emerged
from this crisis into a sometimes unforgiving world.
*Daily Telegraph*
Clair Wills's history of wartime Ireland brings a sane, subtle,
reconciling spirit where once there was only intransigence... It's
hard to imagine a fairer-minded guide...Her book not only fills a
gap...it is a model of exhaustive research and illuminating
example, taking in a wide range of topics--dancing, films,
smuggling, farming, informing, amateur theatre and Step Together
fairs--without losing direction or focus. A particular bonus is the
attention to Irish writers (Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Sean
O'Faolain, Brendan Behan and many more), whose ideas and
experiences from 1939-45 make a fascinating study in
themselves.
*The Guardian*
[An] intensely researched and crisply written book...That Neutral
Island is a psychodrama of guilt and defiance, clarity, resentment
and confusion. Instead of a bibliography it has a 'bibliographical
essay' no less than 30 pages long, which will be mined for
generations to come.
*The Spectator*
The sometimes tragic, often brave, confusion that was wartime
Ireland is brilliantly unpacked here. This is ground that
historians have covered before but none with such a remarkable
array of sources--from German military plans, to contemporary
poetry, to the sermons of Roman Catholic clergy. By skillful use of
her materials, Wills puts together a vivid picture of a little
country that tried to stay out of the war, never quite succeeded,
and suffered ignominy in the process.
*Sunday Herald*
Clair Wills, Professor of Irish Literature at the University of
London, set herself the task of looking beyond the narrow world of
politics to provide a deeper, more complex study of a nation
anxiously clinging to peace in a time of global conflict. She has
succeeded triumphantly in this goal. Sweeping in its scope, packed
with telling details, written in an easy, fluid style, this is a
highly original book about a fascinating period...The book is
brilliant on capturing the strange twilight atmosphere that hung
over the country, reinforced by ruthless censorship and severe
economic shortages...The breadth of Professor Wills's research is
formidable, covering everything from the theatre to the
mobilisation of the army, from sexual mores to the influence of
fascism. The bibliography alone runs to no fewer than 33 pages.
And, behind the glittering text, there hangs the fundamental
paradox, of which the Irish themselves were only too conscious:
that the nation's much-vaunted neutrality, driven by separation
from Britain, was wholly dependent on Britain's ultimate
victory.
*Sunday Telegraph*
There are moving stories of the gathering of bodies from the coast,
of border smuggling and high anxiety over the leaking of
intelligence. An accruing picture of a people and a nation marching
slowly into adversity and penury emerges, the most comprehensive of
its kind on the subject to date, done with a scrupulousness that
make it essential reading.
*Scotland on Sunday*
What a pleasure to read...Simply the best ever social and cultural
history of Ireland during the second world war...This is a quite
outstanding book, not just for its stunningly nuanced insights into
the Irish psyche in time of war, but--often alarmingly--into the
Irish psyche overall.
*Irish Independent*
[A] fascinating, brilliant cultural history of Ireland during the
second World War...The result is a picture of social conditions and
developments in neutral Ireland more detailed and revelatory than
anything we have had before...All of which makes for a very good
book indeed; but what raises it to the exceptional is its complex
meta-narrative, which involves the author in presenting social and
cultural analysis based on research while also addressing such
difficult issues as how neutrality affected Ireland at various
stages of the war, how neutrality was viewed abroad--especially in
the United Kingdom and in the United States--and how these often
intemperate international perspectives bore on Ireland's sense of
itself. In all of this Wills manages to be judicious and
insightful... Indeed I came away from this book with renewed
respect for the way de Valera kept his nerve, when the fate of the
country was an uncertain one and when he had great powers lined up
against him.
*Irish Times*
That Neutral Island, sums up for many Ireland's dubious image
during the war years: indulging in legalistic niceties and
self-righteous pieties while ignoring the struggle elsewhere. But
Wills paints a more complex picture. Neutrality was a struggle for
those involved, and the policy succeeded despite deep political
divisions, economic deprivation and artistic isolation.
*Sunday Times*
This is historical writing at its very best. Wills...interweaves
cultural, social and political history in a beautifully written and
subtly argued account of life during wartime in Ireland. There are
superb analyses of the work of the major Irish writers working in
both English and Irish at this time...as well as interesting
analyses of less well-known writers.
*Tablet*
Wills does a good job of describing Irish neutrality and its
effects, and her portrait of Irish life during World War II is a
full one, bolstered by apt quotes from local and visiting
writers.
*Washington Times*
Ireland's determined neutrality in the Second World War was such a
sore point for Britain that Churchill couldn't restrain
himself--even in 1945, in the hour of triumphant victory--from
lashing out at that nation for the lives it had cost. Perhaps Irish
Prime Minister Eamon de Valera's recent condolence visit to the
German diplomatic representative in Dublin on Hitler's death had
enraged him anew. But as Wills shows in her penetrating account of
why and how Ireland stayed neutral while the global conflict
literally washed up on its shores, more than passionate nationalist
and anti-British feelings were at work in that policy. This
far-ranging book not only explores the strategic and political
reasoning behind Irish neutrality, which had almost unanimous
domestic support, but draws on such resident chroniclers as
Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, and John Betjeman to paint a
detailed picture of how life was lived on this island of light
surrounded by a blacked-out world.
*The Atlantic*
A many-layered, dissecting account not only of the reasons for
Ireland's initial decision to remain neutral, but of the evolving
character of that neutrality; the use and effect of propaganda and
censorship on the Irish people; the effects on the economy and
political system; and the consequences of neutrality for the
national self-image...The nation led, as she puts it, "an uneasy,
suspended form of existence" during the war. Wills examines the
nature of that existence coolly from countless perspectives and in
the lives and works of writers and politicians. In the end, what we
have here is a three-dimensional, untendentious, often
unpalatable--we are dealing with human beings, after all--view of a
period that has been obscured in murk.
*Boston Globe*
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