These Irish Investments: Money as an Organizing Principle in As Music and Splendour (1958)

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Notes

¹ According to Williams, Dickens’s novels are “able to dramatize, as if they were characters, those social forces which are wholly real, in a collective action, but which may never clearly appear in any isolated of individual moments” (“Introduction” 28). As Music and Splendour dramatizes money in a similar fashion, recognizing it as a social force governing the narrative.

² Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames (1883) makes explicit the connection between fashion and speculation. The ambitious Octave Mouret, the protagonist who is proprietor of a women’s department store, explains that “the new type of drapery business […] was now based on the rapid and continuous turnover of capital” (Zola, Au Bonheur des Dames 74).

³ Kate O’Brien studied French at University College Dublin, where she graduated with an honors degree in both English and French. This course, according to college calendars, included studies of Moliere, Beaumarchais, Sainte-Beuve, and Racine (Manning). Later, as a literary critic, “she was equally at home with American and European fiction,” including Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Walshe 69). In her recent study of Mary Lavelle, Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka finds “a comparable precedent” for the style of the novel with Zola’s Nana (1880) (Mentxaka 91–92).

⁴ While O’Brien’s novels are not concerned with the Anglo-Irish demesne, Antonio’s Tuscan estates certainly recall both the confining spaces of Without My Cloak (1936), as well as Somerville and Ross’s French Leave.