Stella Fizthomas Hagan (Stella Jackson)

and The Green Cravat

In January 1987, Stella Jackson, who wrote under the pen name, Stella Fitzthomas Hagan, put a halt to her proposed memoir, declaring it unlikely she would ever manage to finish it. She had only reached the period of the late 1940s, in a life that would span from 1908 -1993. Despite her ardent literary ambitions, she published only one novel in her lifetime, The Green Cravat, about Lord Edward Fitzgerald and 1798, and wrote a handful of plays which were never performed. Jackson features in the chapter on women writers and activists in the Thirties, along with Margaret Barrington, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington and Rosamond Jacob.

Stella Jackson  wrote under the name Stella Fitzthomas Hagan, and  can be regarded as ‘Irish by adoption’, She was, as she put it, ‘suckled, weaned, reared on the Dialectic and on Irish history.” Her father, the English communist historian, T.A Jackson, passed on his affection for Ireland to his daughter and schooled her well in the politics and history of the country. Jackson in typical self-deprecating manner defined herself as “a crazy mixed up classless intellectual”. She was also was a kind of British “red diaper baby.

While in Ireland with her lover Ewart Milne in the years 1939-41, Stella Jackson would research and write a political pamphlet for the Fabian Society on partition in Ireland and would also develop an interest in the 1798 Rebellion, which was to become the theme for the publication of her only novel, 20 years later.  In her memoir, written in the 1980s, she devoted a substantial section to the period she spent in wartime Ireland, and penned observations on the Irish populace and their attitudes to war. Jackson’s memoirs contain novel insights into wartime Ireland from the perspective of an English writer on the Left, one who was anti-imperialist and very much in favour of Irish sovereignty.

“Flotsam and Jetsam”, her unpublished memoir, deserves to be acknowledged within the extensive body of memoirs about the Thirties, one written after the events and one of relatively few penned by working-class left-wing women in British and Irish cultural circles in the Thirties.