O’DONNELL, Peadar. Islanders (First edition)

With an introduction by Robert Lynd. London: Jonathan Cape, 1928. Crown octavo. First edition. pp. Publisher’s sea-green faded cloth, lettered in gilt. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket. Cloth a little mottled with fading to spine; scattered foxing to prelims and fore-edges; jacket rubbed with small chips and short closed tears, spine browned, but complete. A very good copy in the scarce jacket.
Peadar O’Donnell (1893-1986), trade-union organiser, IRA commandant, republican socialist and later editor of The Bell was among the most distinctive voices to emerge from post-revolutionary Ireland. Islanders (1928) was his first book and one of the earliest literary portraits of a modern Irish island community. Drawing on months spent among the people of Arranmore off the Donegal coast, O’Donnell depicts the precarious economy of fishing and smallholdings, the pressures of emigration, the persistence of Irish in the Gaeltacht, and the frictions between traditional patterns of life and the new Free State authorities. The introduction by the Belfast essayist Robert Lynd frames O’Donnell as a humane radical whose sympathies are with labouring people rather than parties, and helped secure Jonathan Cape’s metropolitan readership for a book rooted in the far North-West of Ireland.

[CAT 162]