ABSTRACT
Gerard Whelan ends his novel, A Winter of Spies, set during the War of Independence, with the lines ‘A family cleans up a mess and starts living again. Countries learn to do that too. That’s history for you’ (1998, 191). This attention to the constructed nature of history, to the messiness of human life that is often wiped clean by historical discourse, is the focus of this essay, which explores historical fi ction for children set between 1890 and 1922. The ‘mess’ that writers like Gerard Whelan, Siobhán Parkinson, and Elizabeth O’Hara1 are concerned with in their children’s fi ction includes women’s histories, class politics, and complicated notions of ‘Irishness’. The writers’ choice of the period of time between 1890 and 1922, in which ideas surrounding national identity are being articulated and contested, allows them to undertake a close examination and questioning of the historical discourses that support notions of what ‘Irishness’ means.
