"Blighted Beginnings": Coming of Age in Independent Ireland
offers a much needed examination of the manner in which narratives of emerging selfhood were used persistently by authors in order to critique and reform problems that have plagued post-independence Ireland.The study begins by examining the struggles peculiar to the generation that either came of age during the Irish revolutionary period or immediately after independences whose individual identity-formation coincides with the birth of the Free State. It then looks at how the freedoms of Anglo-Irish children were circumscribed by the traditions of their class, the inheritance of property, and by sectarian prejudice, thereby impeding their maturity, and how the Big House tradition is used both to redress the privilege and colonial abuses of their class and respond to the culture of their resentment that complicated Anglo-Irish life after independence. This study also analyzes how religious vocations, widely encouraged in Ireland, defied the expectations of maturity by insisting upon a renunciation of worldly ambition, an ongoing paternal and institutional dependency, sexual abstinence, and social separation.