Shadows on Our Skin by Jennifer Johnston

Normally when I set out to write a piece of fiction, I invent a setting, a landscape, a climate, a world, in fact, that has no reality outside the pages of the book, and into the world I insert my characters. The unusually titled This is Not a Novel deals with Johnston’s main themes of memory, loss and an inability to come to terms with the past, but the structure is what elevates a seemingly straightforward tale of the damage that family secrets can do into a subtle musing on identity and meaning.

Her books may be ‘quiet’ in terms of their exploration of inner lives and the formation of identity, but her prose is lyrical and elegiac and her focused taut storylines which deal with gender, class, religion and politics, create a distinctive and memorable body of work. She is often described as the ‘quiet’ woman of Irish literature and has joked that the literary establishment think of her as a second rate writer, but this does her a great disservice. She often explores the damage of hidden secrets and the influence of the past on the present, both from a personal and a historical point of view. Although she draws on this tradition, Johnston’s novels instead nearly always centre on the Irish family and the relationships between children and their parents, siblings and lovers played out against the backdrop of Irish history, but never overwhelmed by it. She is often considered to be a ‘Big House’ writer, exploring the social and cultural life of the Anglo-Irish and Protestant ascendancy in the manner of Maria Edgeworth or Elizabeth Bowen. Her milieu is not a fashionable one, her themes not edgy or gritty. Johnston was born into the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy and many of her novels are set in this world, which may go some way to explain the sometimes lack of interest in her work. In 2012 she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards and was nominated for the position of first Irish Laureate for Fiction in 2014 – which was eventually won by Anne Enright. Since then she has published 18 novels and written numerous plays and has won the Evening Standard Best First Novel Award in 1972 for The Captain and The Kings, The Whitbread Prize in 1979 for The Old Jest and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 for her fourth novel Shadows on our Skin. Like many female writers from Ireland, Jennifer Johnston is not as widely read as she should be as is often underestimated given the amount of critical acclaim she has received.īorn in Dublin in 1930, she didn’t publish her first novel until 1972 when she was 42. Reading Ireland Month continues and all this week I will be focusing on women writers from Ireland to maybe introduce you to some you may not have read or known too much about.

Shadows on Our Skin by Jennifer Johnston