• The Mad Cyclist (Dublin: New Writers Press 1970), 20pp. [ltd. edn. 300].
• The Fly and the Bed Bug (Dublin: Beaver Row Press 1984), 48pp.
• Dostoevsky’s Grave: Selected Poems (Dublin: Daedalus 1991), 69pp.
• The White Beach: New and Selected Poems, 1960-1998 (Knockevin: Salmon Publishing 1998), 115pp.
• The Noise of Masonry Settling (Dublin: Dedalus Press 2006), 76pp.

• Girl on a Bicycle: A Novel (Dublin: Irish Writers Co-operative Press 1977), 160pp.
• That London Winter (Dublin: Irish Writers Co-operative Press 1981), 183pp.
• The House (Brandon Press 1984; rep. 2006), 156pp.
• There We Have Been (Dublin: Attic Press 1989, 1990), 96pp.
• Mother to a Stranger (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2002), 186pp.

• A Restless Life (2008)

• Different Kinds of Love (Dublin: Attic Press 1987), 121pp., trans. into German by Ilse Bessen Berger (Berlin: Verlag Ullstein 1991).

• Thursday; Open Ended Prescription [both unpublished]. See also radio plays, The Revenge of Constance; Just Another Killing; also a musical on Edith Piaf.

night I could not sleep
I came to read you in lamplight
poking out the rushes
of books festooned on my shelves
that I look upon as family.
But Leland, you were the least familiar
of kith and kin, given me
by your son, Nicholas in Dingle.
And so, Leland Bardwell,
I stretched out your pages like arms
and undressed you
with my eyes, my ears, my nose, my hands,
my mouth - watering inside -
devoured you! Night I could not sleep,
Leland Bardwell
I came to you out of the rushes of bed sheets,
and held your slender spine
tenderly as the first time I found poetry
singing in me.
The lines of your life on Lower Leeson Street
opened and closed like doors
in my mind, and the sun and moon rose
at the same time.
Leland Bardwell, night I could not sleep
I came to raise the dead
weight of my head from its rushes of knots
and lay it on your lap
where your lyrics ran like fingers through my locks.
Night cannot contain
the strain of thoughts that fly between these walls -
so I have come
to settle them in words
plucking them
from the air, where all things come.
Such thoughts
I had while reading you Leland Bardwell,
night I could not sleep.

—from Adam Wyeth, Silent Music (2011); contributed by the author to 746 Books - online, 11 July 2015; accessed 15.07.2015.

Born in India of Irish parents in 1922, Leland was brought to Ireland at the age of two where she spent a bleak childhood. In her memoir A Restless Life, she details the mental and physical abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother who favoured her elder sister Paloma. She longed to attend Trinity College but the money had been spent on her sister’s education and there was nothing left, her parents being unaware of how bright their youngest child was. Left to her own devices, she read and wrote stories from an early age. She escaped her restless existence in Ireland by falling pregnant while in a relationship with her cousin Christopher (who was not the father of the child) and using the “war effort” as an excuse fled to London where she gave birth to the baby and gave it up for adoption.

Her love life continued to be tumoultous throughout her life. She met and married Michael Bardwell (brother-in-law of Kingsley Amis) and they had twins. She left Michael for his brother Brian, with whom she had a daughter before beginning an affair with another man who lived in the flat upstairs. All the while she continued to see her cousin Christopher on and off. It seems that her neglected childhood made it difficult for her to sustain relationships and she says in her autobiography “ I, always expecting to be the one to be hurt, never believed I could hurt others”.

In the late 50s she found herself at the centre of the Soho literary scene, with friends like Anthony Burgess and Francis Bacon. Patrick Kavanagh was her lodger and between famous wild drunken parties, she began to write in earnest. She moved back to Dublin with a new partner, Finton McLachlan and had three more children, living in relative poverty for the next ten years, scraping by writing reviews. She created another literary “salon” around herself, with Paul Durcan amongst others in attendance and continued to write, but was not published until the end of her relationship with Finton in the 1970s.

Despite being published later in life, she has written 5 collections of poetry, 5 novels, a collection of short stories and several stage, radio and musical plays. She was one of the founder editors of the literary journal Cyphers and established the Irish Writer’s Co-operative with Desmond Hogan and Neil Jordan and has become an influential figure in the Irish literary world without receiving the accolades of her male counterparts.

Now aged 93, Leland lives and works in Sligo and has fulfilled the literary promise that was stifled throughout her life by her sex, and consequently by her relationships and her domesticity. She is a woman who has lived by her own rules often at a time when that was not an easy or acceptable thing to do and she never let go of what she wanted to do. Leland Bardwell is a survivor. I, for one, would love to see her brought out of the shadows.

[...]

— Extract from 746 Books: Confessions of a Book-buying Addict [by “Cathy”]; posted 23.03.2015 - online; accessed 10.07.2015. Cathy goes on to give a full account of Mother to a Stranger (2002) which she calls a ‘[t]his vibrant, earthy and often funny book [that] smartly explores how fragile our sense of self can be and how secrets from the past can never fully be buried.’ (Ibid.)

The Irish poet and novelist Leland Bardwell, who has died aged 94, realised from childhood that a writing life was inevitable. In her memoirs she recorded: “Since the age of six writing had been not an ambition but a condition.”

However, there were years of editorial rejections before Bardwell blossomed into a writer of the poetry, short stories for radio, plays and autobiographical novels that flowed, due in part to the encouragement of the coterie assembled there, from her basement flat in Dublin. Utterly impervious to her near derelict surroundings, she entertained artists and writers, including Patrick Kavanagh, and the poets with whom in 1975 she founded the magazine Cyphers: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Macdara Woods.

At the same time, she co-founded, with Neil Jordan and Steve McDonagh, the Irish Writers’ Co-operative, publishing new writers such as Desmond Hogan, Philip Davison and Sebastian Barry.

Her five volumes of acclaimed poetry were The Mad Cyclist (1970), The Fly and the Bed Bug (1984), Dostoevsky’s Grace (1991), her “new and selected” The White Beach (1998), and finally The Noise of Masonry Settling (2005).

The Mad Cyclist might have been a leitmotif for her literary as well as her personal life: her first novel was Girl on a Bicycle (1977), set in the 1940s. This led to That London Winter (1981), the story of her seven-year affair with a married man. The House (1984), arguably her masterpiece, places her own emotional life in the context of the Protestant-Catholic confrontation in a changing Ireland. Retracing her roots was a constant compulsion, demonstrated in There We Have Been (1989), while Mother to a Stranger (2003) may well be Bardwell’s speculative reverie on the fate of her first child, given up for adoption.

The daughter of Pat and Mary (née Collis) Hone, she came from a family over the centuries had included two distinguished painters, Nathaniel Hone the Elder and the Younger, the stained glass artist Evie Hone, and two Joseph Hones, one a biographer of Yeats, and the other a writer of thrillers. On her mother’s side, her uncles John, Robert and Maurice Collis were all distinguished writers, Robert’s play Marrowbone Lane (1939) having spearheaded the fight against tuberculosis in Ireland.

Born in India, where her father was a railway engineer, Leland never knew stability, as reflected in the title of her memoir, A Restless Life (2008). Deprived of parental love, she declared: “I longed to be an orphan.” The search for love became a career path. “I craved affection as though it were an item to be found on a market stall.”

The family returned to Ireland when Leland was a toddler and settled in County Kildare. She attended the private Church of Ireland Alexandra college in Dublin, but left at 16 when an unwanted pregnancy led her to England, where her baby, Sean, was adopted. She took various menial jobs during the second world war, in which she narrowly escaped death from a German bomb, after which she taught, briefly and unsuccessfully, at Kilquhanity House, near Castle Douglas, in Scotland.

This led to marriage, in 1948, to the poet Michael Bardwell. With Bardwell she had twins, Billy and Anna. An affair with Michael’s journalist brother, Brian, led to the birth of a daughter, Jacqueline.

Back in London, she plunged into the bohemian world of Soho. It was a chaotic, almost phantasmagoric life, in which she met writers and artists including Anthony Cronin, George Barker and Francis Bacon, and gave house room to a drug-crazed baronet.

But love, other than her vixenish concern for her children, eluded her. “In love, I’m a genuinely sick person,” she wrote. “Love aborts my intelligence.” She was, nevertheless, intensely passionate as both friend and writer. Her short story collection Different Kinds of Love (1987) chronicles the advances towards, and retreats from, family, children, passions and friends.

Moving back to Dublin in the late 50s, she met Finton McLachlan, with whom she had three sons, Nicholas, Edward and John. McLachlan was “the most beautiful young man I had ever seen” but also, she recorded, also serially unfaithful who “treated his hangovers with care”. To support herself and her sons, Bardwell took work as a film extra, sometimes with the boys. Her last such appearance was in Educating Rita (1983).

She concluded her memoir with the words: “With the end of the sixties, ‘La Vie de Bohème’ ended.” But Bardwell herself upheld the bohemian life to the last. In 1986 she left Dublin for the gate lodge of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, and in the 90s finally settled on the coast of County Sligo, where she befriended Dermot Healy and founded the literary festival Scriobh.

Her ramshackle lifestyle outraged many in Catholic Ireland, while she was regarded by her own class as an outsider. While the Hones had produced misfits and several dissolute members, Leland outdid them all in her capacity for rebellious freedom. Her morality lay in her faithfulness to the craft of writing and in bearing witness to the different kinds of truth and love with which she was confronted. Her lifelong indenture, equally to the pen and to the search for love, was expressed as: “If it’s bad enough, you might get a poem out of it.”

She is survived by Billy, Anna, Jacqueline, Nicholas, Edward and John.

— Available at The Guardian online; accessed 24 July 2016.