WHITE, Agnes Romilly. Gape Row.

Belfast: William Mullan, 1951. Crown octavo. Second edition. pp. 296. Green cloth, titled in gilt. Occasional mild foxing. A near fine copy in near fine unclipped pictorial dust jacket.

A village novel drawn from the author’s native Dundonald, Gape Row is a closely observed portrait of the cottages that lined the Newtownards Road, locally nicknamed “Gape Row” and of the intertwined lives within them. White unfolds courtships, feuds, bereavements and small triumphs through brisk dialogue and lightly comic set-pieces, giving particular weight to women’s talk, neighbourliness and the everyday economies of a working community. The continuous terrace long remembered in local lore and now vanished.
Agnes Romilly White (1872-1945), daughter of the Church of Ireland rector of Dundonald, wrote only two novels, Gape Row (1934) and Mrs Murphy Buries the Hatchet (1936), both rooted in the village where she grew up.

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