Katrina Goldstone’s talk in the Library’s Invisible Histories series will focus on the life and writing of Stella Jackson, daughter of T.A.Jackson, and in particular focus on Stella’s observations on the Irish radical cultural groups she associated with in the 1930s and 1940s in her unpublished manuscript Flotsam and Jetsam: Memoir of a Revolutionary’s Daughter. Stella published one novel in her lifetime, The Green Cravat, a ‘novelised history’ of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and the 1798 Rebellion, and a political pamphlet on the Partition of Ireland, She also wrote reviews for the Daily Worker, Irish Democrat, and in later life for The Spectator.

Stella Jackson was a woman well used to be being cast into the shadows, or to being defined in relation to men ‑ her father, the communist historian T.A. Jackson, her lover, Ewart Milne, and less frequently Cork writer Patrick Galvin, briefly her husband. Jackson’s memoir offers an intimate snapshot of the small but vibrant radical literary scene in Ireland, and in the London of the interwar period and war years. Her story is just one in Katrina’s new book, Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art Exile and War.

As an independent researcher, Katrina Goldstone has written extensively on minorities, cultural diversity and Jewish communities. She has contributed newspaper features and reviews to numerous publications in Ireland and the UK. She has also been a regular contributor to programmes on RTE commenting on Jewish history, Jewish writers, the Holocaust, Anne Frank, and also on cultural diversity. In the coming semester she will lecture at Trinity College Dublin on Jewish women writers in the 20th century, non-fiction and fiction. Her book Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art, Exile & War, a study on Irish writers’ involvement in internationalism and their role in Thirties left wing cultures, has just been published by Routledge in their Studies in Cultural History series.

This talk will be live-streamed, with login details available via www.wcml.org.uk/events on the day of the talk. It will also be recorded for later viewing on the Library’s YouTube channel.