Anne Chambers is one of Ireland’s best-known biographers. For decades, she has been meticulously preserving Ireland’s past by telling the stories of people who might otherwise have been forgotten. She’s also known for her appearances on RTÉ News and The History Show. Her most successful work is ‘Grace O’Malley: The Biography of Ireland’s Pirate Queen, 1530–1603’.
Now, with the release of her 12th book, Living Lives, Anne has decided to write her own story. It charts her long career, which has taken her from Ireland to Italy, Jamaica and the United States.
It also marks a rare moment in the spotlight for an author who usually writes about others. Launching the book, former Taoiseach Enda Kenny described her work as “extraordinary” and praised her ability to “look into the background of people’s minds”.
Living Lives tells Anne’s story, but also reflects her work documenting the lives of others, and the contribution she has made to how Ireland records and remembers its past. Here, she looks back…
AFTER A CAREER in biography spanning over 40 years, perhaps I could be accused of living my own mundane life through the more exciting lives of my ten subjects. Pirate, prince, patriot, prima donna, playboy planter-emancipator to forgotten survivors of conquest, each of my subjects have brought me on eventful journeys through epochs, cultures and countries.
While other branches of literature can be undertaken from the comfort of one’s home place biography, which has taken me from Westport to the West Indies and many countries in between, requires much time, travel and research before one can start to write.
It has been said that a biographer is ‘an artist under oath’. I prefer the sobriquet of ‘an honest broker’ between the subject and my potential reader. The former, alive or dead, expects that through good research, interpretation and analysis, the biographer will present a fair and balanced account and assessment of their life; while the reader expects that account to be objective and as true to the life in question as biography can hope to be.
The life under scrutiny must also be viewed from within the time scale in which the subject existed. There is little to be gained only misleading, even erroneous, judgments, if a past life is analysed and assessed from the lofty heights of the present day. You must become part of your subject’s world.
Over the years, a highlight of my research ventures was when granted access to private manuscript collections, some of which had lain dormant for over 500 years. As I opened these relics, for the first time since their authors first put quill to parchment, it was like entering an Aladdin’s cave of undiscovered treasure.
My biographies of Grace O’Malley and her son Lord Mayo were greatly enhanced by what I discovered among such manuscripts in the Westport House collection. For the biography of Margaret Burke Sheridan, her extensive personal and operatic memorabilia, which had lain hidden since her death in 1958, helped reveal the woman behind the Diva. Some 15,000 of Lord Sligo’s 18th and 19th century papers, letters and diaries helped bring this forgotten figure, as well as the remarkable role he played in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, to life. While the late Dr T.K. Whitaker’s personal archive helped me find the man behind the public servant and the reasons he was voted ‘Irishman of the 20th Century’.
Age-old stories
Today, the experiences of some of my subjects remain relevant, even inspirational. Grace O’Malley (1530-1603) a woman competing in a presumed male-only preserve, the only female leader ever listed on a national map; who broke the boundaries imposed on women by nature, society, law and religion; juggling a demanding career by land and by sea with marriage, motherhood and family life, as well as confronting the challenges and discrimination posed by female ageing, makes her story resonate today to a new generation awakened by the global focus on gender equality and positive ageing.
The essence of the life of Eleanor, Countess of Desmond (1545-1638), lies not so much in her achievements but in her heroic efforts to survive and protect her family in a period of immense upheaval. The personal trauma she experienced by the violent destruction of the very fabric of her native world and its effects on her family has reverberations and relevance for women caught up in similar situations today.
Women in Ukraine, Palestine, Afghanistan, Iran and other places of conflict, who continue to live lives torn apart by political, social and military upheaval by forces, both foreign and local, over which they have no control. Yet despite such seemingly insurmountable odds, like Eleanor Countess of Desmond five hundred years previously, these unsung heroines continue to protect, nurture and provide for their families and keep hope alive.
Living Lives by Anne Chambers is out now. Red Stripe Press
Red Stripe Press
The recent re-imposition of protectionism and tariffs by the Trump administration in America and its negative effects on world economies would no doubt have been an anathema to T.K. Whitaker (1916-2017). In 1958, his famous blueprint ‘Economic Development’ devised by him and his team of civil servants, rescued the country from economic obliteration by opening it up to free trade. It removed Ireland from its previous adherence to what Whitaker described as a ‘protectionist blockade’, which at the time not only condemned the Irish people to the lowest standard of living in Europe and encouraged emigration, but as Whitaker believed, threatened the country’s very existence as an independent state.
The most obvious corollary emanating from my work as a biographer is that since the beginning of his recorded story, mankind has never changed but continues to portray the same inherited traits and characteristics, exhibiting an inbuilt capacity for both good and evil.
The implacable ability of history to repeat itself and humanity’s inability to learn from its past mistakes is today everywhere visible; from the war in Ukraine, the hell-on-earth that has become Palestine, to the on-going Iran-American-Israel conflict, the cycles of war and peace, as well as economic boom and burst, continue mostly fuelled by mankind’s never changing addiction to power and profit at the expense of humanity and the planet.
While the advent of modern technology, especially AI, will doubtless affect the art of biography, together with the all-consuming ethos of egotistical self-promotion and entitlement that dominates modern-day society, instead of holding a camera to one’s own face, it comes as somewhat of a relief that through the art of biography one can shine a light, learn and write about the life of someone else, someone who made a contribution to their time on this earth.
And in that process of learning about others, perhaps we also discover something about ourselves.
LIVING LIVES: A Biographer’s Journey by Anne Chambers is published by Red Stripe Press.