Courage during Dark Times

The stone dragons that hover over Kilmainham Gaol’s doorway




​My new novel, No Coward Soul Have I, a pre-quel to my award-winning novel, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley (Cuidono Press), has been on my mind for 16 years, from the first time I taught in Ireland and took my students to Dublin’s horrifying Kilmainham Gaol.  From the late 18th-century up through the 1916 Easter Rising, the gaol housed political prisoners, such as Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell in the 19th century, as well as the Easter Rising rebels, such as the rebellion’s leader Patrick Pearse and his colleagues, all of whom were executed by firing squad there in the Stonecutters’ Yard in 1916.

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Here’s one of my student groups standing outside the entrance to Kilmainham before we are about to enter through the portal into the dark, terrifying gaol.



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My brilliant Irish historian friend, Gillian O’Brien, the author of The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion, describes the gaol this way: “[Kilmainham is] poised somewhere between a prison and a shrine.”  As such it’s a place of national memory that tells the stories of extraordinary leaders and ordinary individuals who risked everything in order to free Ireland from centuries of British occupation and tyranny.
One of those ordinary people jailed in Kilmainham was Anne Devlin, Robert Emmet’s friend and colleague. 

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Life-size bronze statue of Anne Devlin in Rathfarnham Ireland, where she lived.






​Charged with treason for her role in Emmet’s failed rebellion, Anne was incarcerated for three years in the darkest and most dismal parts of Kilmainham.  One of the places where Anne was confined was a hole void of light; it resembled an oubliette, a French place of confinement where prisoners were forgotten.  Viewing that place of confinement, I wondered how anyone could survive the deprivation, the torture, the psychological terror of living in such a place, of being able to be courageous enough to never give information about Emmet or any of the other fifty or more brave souls involved in the 1803 rebellion.

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Image depicting Anne Devlin behind bars


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Seeing where Anne was imprisoned led me to want to learn her story within its context.  While conducting thorough research about the gaol and the times, I read several accounts of Anne’s time in Kilmainham but none of them conveyed what I wished to know.  How did it feel to be terrorized daily, to be threatened with hanging repeatedly, to be starved, to be kept in the dark?  How did she maintain her courageous stance?  I knew that I needed to write her story in her own voice and convey the emotional story that has not been told. 
Around the same time, I also learned about Percy Shelley’s idealistic and naïve political aspirations.  When he was nineteen, after being expelled from Oxford University because of his atheism, he traveled to Ireland in 1812 with his first wife Harriet and her sister Eliza.  He had learned about and admired Robert Emmet.  He also learned about the plight of the Catholics in Ireland and wished to free the Irish from British tyranny.  He set out to do so and saw himself as a sort of reincarnation of Emmet.
These two stories came together, and I began to imagine Percy Shelley meeting Anne Devlin in order to learn more about Robert Emmet but also to perhaps learn her story. 
That’s how this novel was conceived as a “what-if” alternate historical fiction.  In it, we learn about Anne’s indomitable courage, but also how Percy and Harriet are tested as their ideals clash with reality.
In these times, I hope that this novel engenders courage in all of us.  We may never be imprisoned or deprived in the way Anne Devlin was, but I hope that we can learn how to be resilient in our own times of darkness.

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