Ross Lambart, a young Englishman and soldier serving in Ulster, is recruited for the United Irishmen by Thomas Russell, meets Harry Maxwell, and falls in love with his sister Katherine. Harry and Katherine are son and daughter of the Anglican rector of Ballynahinch, also a patriot though of no particular colour or association. Lambart is arrested by a double-agent before the Rising and imprisoned in Kilmainham, Dublin, where, after enduring hardships, he persuades the Governor’s wife to permit me ‘leave’ of 48 hours to visit his friends in Ulster on the collapse of the Rising ’98 there. He arrives in time to witness the execution of Harry Maxwell, who dies on the gallows in spite of a plot to make the rope too short to break his neck. Kathleen extorts from Lambart the promise that he will help her get revenge for her brother’s death and the oppression of her countrymen under English misrule. Although he feels this to be an immoral bargain, he gives his word. After four more years in prison at Fort George in Scotland he is released and goes to Paris where he rejoins Thomas Russell. Together they travel to the North of Ireland to instigate an Northern rising in support of Emmet.

 Meanwhile, Lambart has sold the English home that he inherited as a token of his commitment to Ireland and to Katherine, who is meanwhile storing arms for the coming rebellion that she believes will take place when Russell returns to inspire his countrymen. Deeply disappointed by the failure of the Ulstermen to ‘come out,’ Katherine begins to respond to Lambart’s amorous addresses. Putting aside his growing misgivings about the bargain he has made, Lambart sets off to meet Russell, who is planning an attempt to release Robert Emmet from goal in Dublin. In a struggle to evade capture by a troop of soldiers, Lambert shoots one of them fatally, and is sentenced to death by hanging. Meanwhile, Katherine falls into a fever after her recent exertions and recovers only to hear that Lambart was due to die that morning. She now comes to feel that it was her immoderate patriotic passion which brought him to his death and she repents of it. But Lambart is not dead: at the last moment, as the planks were to be removed from under his feet, a messenger arrived with a reprieve from William Pitt, elicited by the influence of his English relatives. Visiting Lambart in prison, Katherine agrees to share his exile, and all - including the Governor - rejoice that ‘is glad one good life is spared.’

In choosing an English hero who falls in love with an Irish patriot, Bennett defines a kind of nationalism that Protestant middle-class Ireland could engage with but which remained at one remove from the more belligerent nationalism of the majority of her Catholic contemporaries. Like many others of her class, she was sympathetic to the United Irishmen who were felt to be much like themselves as distinct from the Anglo-Irish grandees. Equally typically, however, she cannot endorse their extremist politics nor accept it as a model for modern times in Ireland.

 Indeed, the main object of the narrative is to convey the dangers of a too emotional commitment to the idea of Irish nationhood, or - what usually coincides with it - to the idea of a national vendetta against perfidious England. The plot has an almost allegorical aspect in so far as Katherine - otherwise Kate, Katie, Katrin - is plainly a type of Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the personification of Ireland and her historic wrongs. It is Katherine who urges Lambart on to rebellion and revenge, and it is she who learns, finally, that her ignoble passions have sacrificed the life of her lover to the gallows. The implication is that others who fell victim to the military or judicial might of England in the Rising were equally deluded by a romantic spell. Indeed, it is explicitly stated that leader, Thomas Russell, is a rare charmer and capable of instilling passionate affection in his followers. It is he who made the ‘medicine’ that the Maxwell’s and Lambart have imbibed.

 Throughout the novel, Lambart Ross is magically led by his devotion equally to Russell and to Katie to do things that he would not contemplate in terms of his own political principles - those of an English Commonwealth republican - nor even in terms of his practical sense of Ireland’s terrible wrongs, since rebellion is not on any rational calculation the surest way to right them. A further disorder in the world of the novel is that Lambart permits himself to be led by a woman; and it is only when Katherine herself is persuaded by the shock of his supposed execution that she has compelled him to pay the price for her hysterical patriotism that the urge to fulfil the subservient part of an ordinary wife and mother takes possession of her soul.

 All of this suggests an acceptance of the political status quo, and a patriarchal conception of sexual relationships which leaves no room for the view that Louie Bennett was the advanced feminist and socialist reformer that her biographer, R.M. Fox shows her to have been (Louie Bennett, 1958). But this novel was indeed written early in her life and notably before the Lock-Out Strike of 1913 which moulded her adult character. What the book represents as it stands is the outlook of a supporter of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the era of John Redmond’s leadership, and nothing in fact that would have been mortally offensive to a Southern Unionist of the period when it was written.

 There is a pervasive sense of meliorism, but no definite argument for Home Rule, still less Republican Independence. There is a sense that some sort of reparation must be made for the long tale of English misgovernment in Ireland, but no substantive indication as to what form Irish political institutions of the future ought to take. When it comes to the specifics of political ideology, the novel retreats into the cloudy realm of Christian teleology, conjuring at the end a vague image of the Burning Bush with an even vaguer promise of a new covenant between God and man. [BS]