Description
Mairin Mitchell (1895–1986) lived a long and remarkable life in interesting, often troubled times. Born in England to an Irish father and an English mother, she would, as a student in London in the 1910s, break with conventionality and immerse herself in a lively underground culture of anarchism, feminism, mysticism and Irish republicanism before embarking on a bohemian life of travel and writing.
Arlen House is proud to publish the first English-language edition of Storm Over Spain, her most important book, since 1937, its original date of publication. It is both a memoir of the author’s journey through the fragile Spanish Republic in April and May 1936, just weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War, and a distinctive commentary on the war itself. In Storm Over Spain Mitchell, fluent in Spanish and with an extensive understanding of Spanish history and culture, depicts a country on the brink. Anarchists, Catholic clergy, Basque Nationalists and above all ordinary Spanish people all get their say in this vivid, characterful and often wonderfully eccentric memoir. There are lively descriptions of Malaga, Almargen, Ronda and the Basque Country; of the costas before mass tourism; of gitanas and anarchists; and of Spain’s Islamic heritage.
Praised at the time by Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, former Labour leader George Lansbury, and George Orwell, who considered it one of the best and most even-handed accounts of the Spanish conflict he had read, Storm Over Spain easily holds its own alongside the writings of Kate O’Brien and Peadar O’Donnell as a distinctly Irish account of the war. Not only does Mitchell note the significant Irish contribution to Spanish history, she draws parallels between Ireland’s past and Spain’s present and makes a plea to her Irish readership to reject Franco and instead side with the beleaguered Republic. Forty years on from Mitchell’s death, and ninety since the start of the Spanish Civil War, this is a timely reissue.