Female gothics and the traumatic legacy of Ireland’s revolutionary years: Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House and Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited

By Karen Steele
Published in Irish Studies Review, January 2025.
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Abstract

This article explores Rosamond Jacob’s The Troubled House (1938) and Dorothy Macardle’s The Uninvited (1942), two works of fiction that employ a gothic aesthetic to confront readers with the failings of a republican movement to which they had actively contributed. If providing distinctive perspectives on revolution, war, and nation-building, both novels similarly employ the gothic to draw our attention to the pathology of venerating motherhood while ignoring the complex realities of Irish women’s lives. Read together, The Troubled House and The Uninvited exemplify the fruitful ways that a gothic aesthetic can simultaneously elicit a broad readership while delivering a dissident message that many readers would not otherwise wish to hear.