The Friendship of Scholars by Rosie Nee 

REVIEW BY NICHOLAS CANNY

The use of historical fiction to shed light on events in the distant past has been used to great effect by the late Hilary Mantel in her Wolf Hall trilogy, situated in sixteenth century England, and by Maggie O’Farrell in Hamnet, where she conjures up the boyhood experience of William Shakespeare.

Rosie Nee, in this her first novel, does not acknowledge the influence of either such author, but she follows the lines established by them in an effort to illuminate the past through imaginative leaps where evidence fails. The challenge that she set herself is to speculate on what conditions were like within and without the walls of Galway during the tumultuous years between the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland in October 1641 until 1651, when the town’s defenders finally surrendered to the English parliamentary army and reconciled themselves to the confiscation that followed.

In her historical reconstruction, Rosie Nee is guided by the best authorities as she describes the tensions that possibly developed between many of the elite merchant families of Galway (most of them with land in the surrounding countryside) and the artisan and poorer elements of the city’s population.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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