A SHORT story, believed to have been written by the Irish revolutionary James Connolly, has been discovered by academics at the University of Glasgow.
The story, The Agitator's Wife, is by an anonymous writer, but is believed to have been written by Connolly, who was born Edinburgh.
The Agitator’s Wife was discovered last year, during the 150th anniversary year of the birth of the Irish rebel leader who was born in 1868, and died at the hands of a British firing squad in 1916 for his role in the Easter Rising.
Connolly is known as a republican and socialist, but he was also a gifted writer, who wrote two plays.
The story was discovered in a journal, archived in Warwick University Library, and academics believe it may provide clues for an undiscovered play also written by Connolly.
The Agitator’s Wife is centred around a dockworkers’ strike, and the University says this reflects the influence on Connolly's life of the struggles of Scottish dockers against the Shipping Federation on the Leith waterfront from the late 1880s onwards.
The story tells the tale of dockers’ leader Tom Arnold, who is "driven to exhaustion by the pressures of leading a strike in the face of police provocation and brutality."
Tom’s wife Mary steps into his shoes and leads the strikers when they are about to give up their struggle.
Glasgow University academics Professor Willy Maley, Dr Maria-Daniella Dick and Kirsty Lusk write of the story in Irish Studies Review, which is published this week.
They say: "No script has ever been found, and there is no specific record of performance” of a play based on the story, but The Agitator’s Wife was “first alluded to in his (Connolly’s) daughter Nora’s 1935 memoir entitled Portrait of a Rebel Father”, as part of “a conversation between her father and mother – Lillie (née Reynolds) when they lived in America.”
The Irish Studies Review article goes on to say: “We believe we may have unearthed, if not the play itself, then at least a version of the missing play.
"An anonymously published short story in the February 1894 issue of an obscure and short-lived Christian Socialist journal, The Labour Prophet, bears the title “The Agitator’s Wife”.
"This is of course a short story and not a play, but in every other sense it fits the bill for Connolly’s missing piece of writing.
"It was written in the appropriate period, it has the same title, it is rich in dialogue and it reminds us strongly of Connolly’s other writing in its politics, its themes and in its socialist feminist viewpoint, which was rare for that time."
Professor Maley added: "There were two 'lost' plays attributed to Connolly in his daughter Nora’s memoir – The Agitator’s Wife and Under Which Flag.
"Under Which Flag, the better known of the two lost plays, was performed at Liberty Hall in Dublin a few days before the Rising and was rediscovered in 1969. "However, The Agitator’s Wife appears to have never been publicly performed.
"The discovery of the short story with the same name as The Agitator’s Wife, does raise the possibility in our minds that the “play” Connolly’s daughter Nora heard her mother speak of and recounted in her memoir was in fact a short story, and that Nora Connolly may have just simply misheard or misinterpreted.”
Connolly lived from 1868, when he was born in Cowgate, Edinburgh, to1916.
He was one of the leaders of the 1916 Irish Easter Rising and one of the seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation of Independence.
He was court-martialled and executed by firing squad on 12 May 1916.
Professor Maley said: “For Connolly, his idea of a workers’ republic had at its heart the equal rights of all men and women.
"It is no surprise then that at the heart of The Agitator’s Wife is a partnership of equals between Tom and Mary Arnold – where when needed they could reverse roles. Putting this into context, this was written at a time when women couldn’t even vote never mind be seen as equals."
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