Hybrids, as horticulturists know, sometimes produce the most brilliant blossoms in the garden. Hybridization in human culture, particularly in the arts, can also have memorable results. Anglo-Irish writing, from Maria Edgeworth to William Trevor, has been one of the glories of literary art; but the term "Anglo-Irish" can be confusing, because it is sometimes applied to all literature in English by Irish writers—as distinguished from literature in the Irish language, which is considerable.

Julian Moynahan, in his comprehensive and satisfyingly readable study subtitled "The Literary Imagination in a Hyphenated Culture," defines his subject as follows: "Anglo-Irish literature is the writing produced by that ascendant minority in Ireland, largely but not entirely English in point of origin, that tended to be Protestant and overwhelmingly loyal to the English crown, and had its power and privileges secured by the English civil and military presence." In political and economic terms the Protestant Ascendancys golden age came during the last decades of the eighteenth century, when the Irish Parliament asserted its power as an independent governing body. This coincided with an inspired building boom which made Dublin one of the great Georgian capitals in Europe.

"Something shattering would have to happen," Moynahan writes, "to awaken the Ascendancy to reality and to show its members how they actually stood toward the English and toward their fellow-Irish before a genuine Anglo-Irish literature . . . could get under way." With almost uncanny timing the first demonstrably Anglo-Irish novel, Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth, was published in 1800, the fateful year of the Act of Union, when the Ascendancy doomed itself to eventual extinction by voting, under heavy pressure from England, aided by thousands of pounds in bribes, for the dissolution of the Dublin parliament.

In addition, during the period under consideration the underpinnings of Anglo-Irish power were steadily being eroded. Advocates of Home Rule were making their voices heard in the Parliament at Westminster. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 brought the previously disenfranchised majority into the political realm. Think of the implications of the following statement made by the Chief Chancellor of Ireland in the eighteenth century: "The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic"! Eighteen thirty-eight saw Parliament deny the (Protestant) Church of Ireland its right to exact tithes from the largely Roman Catholic population, and in the 1860s the Church of Ireland was disestablished. The great famines of the 1840s depopulated the land through starvation, disease, and immigration, bankrupting the landlord class, whose rents depended on the decimated peasantry. These disasters were followed by the mid-century land wars and finally by Gladstones Land Law Act of 1881. Inexorably during the nineteenth century "the Ascendancy," in Moynahans words, "becomes a Descendancy." Its literary golden age came during its long period of decline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

While Moynahan could perhaps have begun his story seventy-five years earlier, with Jonathan Swift, he argues persuasively for Castle Rackrent as the work that laid the groundwork for the Anglo-Irish literary tradition. Readers familiar with this literature will experience a shock of recognition upon reading a "check list of characteristics, if not a paradigm," that Moynahan draws up in his chapter on Maria Edgeworth, finding a set of common themes and concerns that pertain throughout the roughly two hundred years of its history—characteristics that are already present in Maria Edgeworths writings. Without going over Moynahans list item by item, I am largely basing my discussion on his almost-paradigm.

Prominent on his check list is "a focus on the fortunes or misfortunes of the rural proprietors and their families in the isolated estate houses of the Irish country districts as Anglo-Irish power and authority begin their long contraction and decline? The scenes of this body of literature are largely drawn from the countryside, and the rural settings lead naturally to another characteristic: a sense of loneliness and isolation which help form that ethos which Yeats would define as "Anglo-Irish solitude."

The Anglo-Irish did not create an urban literature. By contrast James Joyce, a contemporary of Somerville and Ross, wrote one of the great urban novels, Ulysses (published three years before The Big House of Inver). Its interesting to speculate about the cultural differences that led Joyce to write a walkabout novel, naming his character after a legendary wanderer, at the same time that members of the more established Irish ruling class focused on place and habitation. While the term "big house literature" ("big house" being the description of a house occupied by the gentry or aristocracy in Ireland) does not exhaust a taxonomy of their literary output, it goes far in that direction. It is striking how many novels by members of this class — planters and settlers, administrators, country gentlemen, daughters of gentry families—concern themselves with, are even named after, houses.

Starting with Maria Edgeworths fictional Castle Rackrent, the genre was distinguished later in the course of its development by books like The Big House of Inver by Somerville and Ross and Bowens Court by Elizabeth Bowen. Moynahans high opinion of Bowen is justified. "As time passes since her death in 1973," he writes, "we are beginning to see Elizabeth Bowen as one of very few great writers of prose fiction at work in Ireland and England between the end of the First World War and the end of the 1960s."

The mention of Bowen is a reminder that a large number of these writers were women. I have no explanation for this, except to suggest that literature was a nexus where the big houses and their daughters intersected. While the sons of Anglo-Irish families typically entered the law or the church, or became officers in the armed forces, the daughters were often left at home to manage the house, which over and over again is depicted as a burden.

The battle between man-made habitation and the punishing Irish weather is a recurring motif in this literature. For Somerville and Ross as well as for Elizabeth Bowen, writing became an attempt—successful for the former, ultimately futile for the latter—to save the family house, without which Anglo-Irish identity threatened to dissolve, leaving them stranded amongst and undistinguished from the "mere Irish." The consciousness of decline and ruination, as in the literature of the American South, gives these stories of collapsing houses and old families gone to seed the poignancy of elegy and the dignity of classical tragedy.

As colorful and admirable and appealing as the authors of and characters in these books can be—particularly given that we are viewing the class through its own eyes—it is well to remember that the Anglo-Irish were a ruling class imposed on the native population by the English Crown. That land forcibly taken from the Irish beginning in Elizabethan times was then rented back to them, remains an injustice that cannot be explained away. Dated, polemical, and partially discredited as it may be, The Hidden Ireland (1924) by Daniel Corkery is helpful in providing the other side of the Irish story.

There is evidence of affectionate relations between some tenants and some landlords, and in the countryside even today people remember which were the "good" landlords and which were the "bad." Rents were allowed to go unpaid in many cases, and during the Famine some landlords bankrupted themselves in an effort to save their tenants. Famous examples exist of landlords who died after contracting famine fever (typhus) while nursing their tenants. Two men who died in this way were Lady Gregorys father-in-law and Thomas Martin of Ballynahinch, a relation of Martin Ross. In addition, the Anglo-Irish landlords have the reputation of having been more humane than the native Irish middlemen or "grabbers" who bought up their estates during the nineteenth century.

Still, the Anglo-Irish remained, to a greater or lesser degree, interlopers. Referred to in the Irish language as "strangers" or simply "English," they stoutly regarded themselves as Irish and had very ambivalent attitudes toward England. A good place to get a sense of this dilemma, this source of cultural schizophrenia, is The Last September, Elizabeth Bowens book about the Troubles of the 1920. In a passage quoted by Moynahan, the young heroine Lois looks down on the big house called Danielstown, modeled on Bowens Court, from the mountains:

The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to huddle its trees dose in fright and amazement at the wide light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set.

Moynahan, with a good eye for metaphor, comments: "She sees the estate as a jewel; others [the IRA], spying from the mountains and attacking from under the protective dusk of dense trees, see instead the chains by which jewels like Danielstown hung upon the unwilling bosom of the country."

Anglo-Irish estrangement from their country of residence, as strangers in a strange land, was the source both of their existential insecurity and of a heightened awareness that gives their literature its edge. They developed, according to Moynahan, a "fascination, often a nervous one, with the lives of the peasantry, that majority population of native Irish people who live surrounding and subordinate to the landlord class." One might question how Moynahan is able to get away with including William Carleton among the Anglo-Irish, since he was not of planter stock. Still the title of Carletons masterpiece, Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830-33), is indicative of the "attitude of research" which the Anglo-Irish took toward the lives of the people. And this is one of the attitudes that links the Anglo-Irish to the ruling classes of colonized countries throughout the world.

The less knowledgeable a commentator is, however, the more likely he will be to try to link the Irish dilemma with colonialism or to speak of the country today as a "post-colonial" phenomenon. Moynahan wipes the floor with Edward Saids Field Day pamphlet, Yeats and Decolonization, in which "Ireland is presented as an overseas (!) territory victimized by systematic British imPerialism and struggling to decolonize itself according to ideological blueprints derived from Franz Fanons Wretched of the Earth (1965)."

Whatever ones attitudes about the British Empire—and my own are nuanced and ambivalent—even the most convinced Anglophile must shake his head in disbelief at Britains actions toward Ireland over the centuries: The brutality, for instance, with which Irish partisans in the 1798 Rising (brought to a wide audience by the great historical novelist Thomas Flanagans best seller The Year of the French) were massacred, while the French officers who had led them were billeted in the best hotels in Dublin while awaiting repatriation; Britains studied, Malthusian indifference to the starvation of hundreds of thousands of people during the Famine. Even an action as recent as the Major governments release of a British soldier who had been convicted of murdering a teenaged girl in Northern Ireland in the summer of I995 just days before the start of the infamous "marching season"—which seemed calculated to incite riots in the province and endanger the peace process. It is hard to know whether to attribute this pattern of behavior to indifference or pure stupidity.

The Anglo-Irish were, of course, painfully aware of British callousness and in-comprehension. Much of the humor in Somerville and Rosss stories comes from their strategy of placing the visiting Englishman in a position to misinterpret Irish life comically. The Honourable Basil Leigh Kelway in "Lisheen Races, Second-hand," for instance, comes over on a junket, "collecting statistics . . . connected with the liquor question in Ireland, telling his friend, now an Irish R.M., that "he thought of popularizing the subject in a novel, and therefore intended to, as he put it, master the brogue before his return."

But what were they to do? Their very existence depended, as Moynahan makes plain, on being backed up by British might. The assessment of their position offered by a commentator on the famine of 1848 is harsh but has the ring of truth to it:

They form no class of the Irish people or any other people. Strangers they are in the land they call theirs, strangers here and strangers everywhere, owning no country and owned by none; rejecting Ireland and rejected by England; tyrants to this island and slaves to another; here they stand . . . alone in the world and alone in its history, a class by themselves.

The bleakness of this view shows the background against which the immense achievement of Anglo-Irish literature was created. Year by year from 1800 on, as their position became less and less tenable, the heart and pluck and humor of those whom Yeats called "the indomitable Irishry" built from words a hybrid literature that will stand with the worlds best.

Anglo-Ireland and its literature have flowered and gone to seed, dried up and blown away. Their legacy, though, has to some extent hybridized itself into the continuing vitality of Irelands literary culture. Seamus Heaney has gone to school both to Carleton and to Yeats. Though there is nothing hyphenated about his own imagination, Heaney, like Carleton, Somerville and Ross, Bowen, and Yeats, has sometimes functioned as an interpreter of his own culture for a larger English-speaking readership. His mediation between the homely and the cosmopolitan, which was at the core of Anglo-Irish literature, is given voice in the poem "Making Strange." The poem tells of bringing a visitor to his home country. "I found myself driving the stranger," he writes,

through my own country, adept at dialect, reciting my pride in all that I knew, that began to make strange at that same recitation.