Heather Ingman, in her chapter, explores W. B. Yeats’s legacy in the construction of the myth surrounding the Big House, the country estates that served as a potent symbol of Anglo-Irish Ascendancy rule in Ireland. The Big House novel, which rose to prominence in the late eighteenth century, created over the ensuing two hundred years new grounds of recognition for the iconic Georgian structures that presided over vast demesnes until the Land Wars and the War of Independence altered forever the Anglo-Irish landscape. Ingman shows how the Yeatsian myth of the Big House was undermined in novels by, among others, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Jennifer Johnston, William Trevor, and John Banville. But even in the process of dismantling the myth, these novels retained a small portion of the Big House’s cultural value because its symbolic value could be taken for granted, if only to transform it.

This chapter considers the poetry of leading Irish poets (including W. B. Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy) and how their poems encountered World War One both in contemporary time and also retrospectively, in the poems of Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, among others. An important feature of this chapter is the retrieval of several forgotten or neglected voices, including Winifred Letts and Mary Devenport O’Neill. The politics of ‘Empire’ and the role of Irish nationalism are considered in the context of the country, north and south, concluding with a survey of Irish poets writing today and their understanding of the problematic legacies of World War One in relation to Irish literary, cultural, and political history.

The accretion of Anglo-Irish identity around the symbolic locus of the ‘Big House’ is in many respects a distraction from any socio-economic reality, yet this tradition remains compelling within an Irish literary narrative. This chapter considers the deployment of the genre in relation to the work of Elizabeth Bowen, as it eventually becomes used as a motif through which to explore themes that could scarcely have been thought of when the original Ascendancy homes were built. It queries the accepted relationship between literary setting and social caste, and outlines fresh critical parameters for this recurrent idiom. Initially reviewing works such as Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, published in 1966, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles (1970) and John Banville’s Birchwood (1973), the first part of the chapter argues that these writers reinvigorated Big House fiction through stylish interventions in language and a thematic turn towards metafiction. It then discusses how in the 1970s, under the impact of revisionism, events in the North and the growth of feminism, Jennifer Johnston and Caroline Blackwood reinvented the Big House narrative of Anglo-Irish decline, subverting and parodying the conventions of a genre that until then had seemed stable and familiar.