Irish Writers and their Critics

Ireland’s novelists, poets and playwrights are not always the genius figures their reputation may suggest. Fashions change, new writers strive to make their own reputation at the expense of respected elder figures.
Even among their contemporaries (or their relatives!), jealousy, refusal to acknowledge the better man or woman, and mischief can wound an author. Sometimes these wounds are inflicted posthumously, or discovered only after the correspondence of both literary greats is exhibited publicly.
Critics of the written or performed word are among the wittiest and most cutting exponents of this art.

Shaw writes his plays for the ages: the ages between five and twelve.
George Jean Nathan (critic) on George Bernard Shaw

You seem Mr Yeats, to be getting beautifully worse; you astonish me more and more.
There seem to be shallows in you of which no-one ever dreamed.
Sean O’Casey (1880-1964), Letter to William Butler Yeats, May 1928

Good acting covers a multitude of defects. It explains the success of Lady Gregory’s plays.
Oliver St John Gogarty [Lady Augusta Gregory was a leading light in the Irish Literary Revival movement of the late 19th / early 20th century]

One could never have guessed that she could write her name.
Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, 1821, on Maria Edgeworth [author of ‘Castle Rackrent’ among others]
This apparently cruel jibe was a comment on her modest demeanour, not the quality of her writing: Byron writes before this that ‘her conversation was as quiet as herself’.

An insensible mass of alcohol, nicotine and feminine intoxication. A heap of guts. With no end...
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) letter to Arland Ussher (1937) on Samuel Beckett

Why don’t you write books people can read!
Mrs Nora Joyce [née Barnacle], to her husband James