Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880-1935

by Sinéad McCoole

Overview

Lady Lavery has been remembered for the numerous portraits by her husband, the painter Sir John Lavery, celebrated in ‘The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ by W.B. Yeats. This first biography of Hazel, first published in 1996 and now reissued, tells the story of how a girl from boomtown Chicago became one of the most stylish society hostesses in London, turning her husband’s studio into a hub of Anglo-Irish diplomacy, from the 1921 Treaty negotiations through the tumultuous early years of the Irish Free State. Using hitherto-unpublished letters and scrapbooks, Sinéad McCoole gives a vivid account of Hazel’s artistic and political preoccupations, and of her extraordinary effect upon the male politicians of Ireland and Britain, for whom she and her salon represented common ground. Romance and politics converged in her relationships with two hard men of nationalist Ireland who each met violent deaths, Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins, whose passionate letters to Hazel reveal the inner man beneath the political carapace. Hazel also forged durable alliances with the pillars of British government – Winston Churchill, Ramsay MacDonald and Lord Londonderry among others – while relishing friendships with leading writers of the day such as G. B. Shaw, J.M. Barrie, Lennox Robinson and Evelyn Waugh. This lavishly illustrated, richly documented life of Lady Lavery relates how one beautiful American woman reinvented herself as ‘a simple Irish girl’ and came to personify Eire on Ireland’s banknotes, ‘living and dying ... as though some ballad-singer had sung it all’.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781843512899
Publisher:	Lilliput Press, Limited, The
Publication date:	09/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	1
File size:	8 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sinéad McCoole is a historian, curator and broadcaster. Her books include Guns and Chiffon (Dublin 1997), No Ordinary Women: Irish Female Activists 1900–1923 (Dublin 2003) and Easter Widows (Dublin 2014). She was appointed to the Government’s Expert Advisory Group on the Decade of Centenaries in 2012.

Editorial Reviews

A Dubin-based historical researcher rights a historical wrong by revealing Lady Hazel Lavery as more than just a pretty face commemorated on Irish banknotes and in more than 400 paintings by her famous husband, John Lavery.

Hazel Martyn Lavery may have been dubbed "The Most Beautiful Girl in the Midwest" in her boarding school days, but by the time she died in 1935 she had influenced some of Ireland's most important revolutionary leaders—notably Michael Collins and Kevin O'Higgins—and thus the direction of the freedom movement itself. She also counted among her many friends people such as Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and J.M. Barrie. McCoole ably traces this transformation from transplanted American to self-appointed Irish ambassador. Using previously unpublished documents and other sources, McCoole breaks new ground in her portrayal of a woman struggling to find her place in a world where women's roles were restricted (she suffered two nervous breakdowns). She takes us through Lady Lavery's unhappy first marriage, her second marriage to Lavery and her evolving role as vital social diplomat. At their London home she and Lavery hosted meetings between key British and Irish leaders and produced an artistic record of the Irish struggle via Lavery's paintings. An inveterate flirt, Lady Lavery was not just intellectually involved with her Irish friends. Although it is not absolutely certain she and Collins were lovers, McCoole leaves little doubt of their emotional passion. When he died she took up a similar relationship with O'Higgins, who was also assassinated.

Part love story, part sociological/historical analysis, this is a thorough mini-history of Ireland's fight for freedom and a tantalizing portrait of a woman who was at once determined and vulnerable, talented and yet unsure.

Kirkus Reviews