In these novels the exclusion of the outside world is almost as sweeping as with Jane Austen.

The whole picture suggests a caricature rather than a realist portrait. Anyhow the Kellys - with a drunken, lecherous father, putting local girls up the pole a brutalised sub-servient wife, worn out by child-bearing and the utter squalor of their cottage, outside and in, - can hardly be considered typical. , &c.], in Crane Bag (1980): ∞ven in The Gates, where an entire Catholic family is described, the husband and the two elder boys in this family are working on the estate. Mark Mortimer (The World of Jennifer Johnston. But what of the outside world, the great mass of the people, the Catholic poor? In Jennifer Johnstons world such people exist primarily, almost exclusively, in relation to the Big House they serve maids and housekeepers, gardeners and grooms, cooks and chauffeurs. Such figures and the world they belong to represent only a segment of Protestant society in Ireland (it would take the subtlety of a Proust to analyse the social and religious differences existing among the Irish Protestants), but a segment with influence out of all proportion to its size, whose contribution to the life of the country has been impressive in many spheres of action. Irish readers, and those acquainted with Ireland, will recognise the type, anomalous perhaps in the Republic of today, but difficult to visualise elsewhere. Mark Mortimer, The World of Jennifer Johnston: A Look at Three Novels, in The Crane Bag, 4, 1 (1980), pp.88-94: It would appear that in the person of Frederick Moore we have something like an ideal portrait. Jennifer Johnston: Commentary & Quotations

Shadows on our skin jennifer johnston