No Coward Soul Have I by Kathleen Williams Renk published in November 2024 and was conceived as a “what-if” alternate historical fiction imagining Percy Shelley meeting Anne Devlin. Anne Devlin was an Irish rebel who had been imprisoned for three years in Dublin’s notorious Kilmainham Gaol for her involvement in Robert Emmet’s failed 1803 rebellion.
In the novel, we learn about Anne Devlin’s indomitable courage, but also how Percy and Harriet Shelley are tested as their ideals clash with reality.
“Blending history and fiction it takes readers on an immersive and evocative journey through nineteenth-century Dublin. The city becomes as much a character as the poets, patriots and poor that walk its streets and tell its stories.”
— Gillian O’Brien, author of The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death, and Rebellion & Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago
Kathleen has shared a wonderful guest post and a short extract for you to enjoy, so I hope to whet your appetite for more! Full details are available below.
[ About No Coward Soul Have I ]
Imagine Percy and Harriet Shelley meeting Anne Devlin, an Irish rebel who had been imprisoned for three years in Dublin’s notorious Kilmainham Gaol for her involvement in Robert Emmet’s failed 1803 rebellion.
It’s 1812 and young Percy Shelley, recently expelled from Oxford University, because of his professed atheism, decides to begin his political life by aiding the Irish in their effort to repeal the 1801 Act of Union of Great Britain and Ireland, while trying to complete Emmet’s rebellion.
In this alternate history, Percy and his wife Harriet, full of unrealistic and lofty goals, crash against the reality of an oppressed Ireland and proud patriots like Devlin, who have no reason to trust the British, no matter how often they profess to possess Irish hearts.
No Coward Have I ~ Purchase Link
[ Extract ]
Prologue
1803 Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin
Anne Devlin
Everything became a shadow, a shade. I had descended into Dante’s hell with no guide. Like being buried alive, but on my feet. I was still standing. Stretching my hand out and feeling the sodden, slimy wall, I wondered whose hands had touched these walls before me. I kept reaching until I had walked the pit’s circumference.
Mr. Emmet told me about the French oubliette, far worse than a mere dungeon. The oubliette is a hole in the ground that the French tyrants push people into, and then they cover the hole with a grate. As the ultimate punishment, this is the place where you are forgotten and then starved to death. You may cry, scream, beg for mercy but to no avail. Is this Kilmainham Gaol’s version of the oubliette, I wondered?
Will I be ignored, forgotten? Will they feed me? Will I ever see the sun and stars again? What did I do to deserve this? I’m a simple country girl who loved Mother Ireland. My only crime. Oh, that and devoting myself to Mr. Emmet, whom the British called a traitor. I would have to atone, but I would leave that between me and God. Until then I needed to keep my wits, my faculties. I would have to trust that God would not fail me, even after Robert Emmet had.
Courage during Dark Times – Guest Post by Kathleen Williams Renk
My new novel, No Coward Soul Have I, a pre-quel to my award-winning novel, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley (Cuidono Press), has been on my mind for 16 years, from the first time I taught in Ireland and took my students to Dublin’s horrifying Kilmainham Gaol. From the late 18th-century up through the 1916 Easter Rising, the gaol housed political prisoners, such as Robert Emmet and Charles Stewart Parnell in the 19th century, as well as the Easter Rising rebels, such as the rebellion’s leader Patrick Pearse and his colleagues, all of whom were executed by firing squad there in the Stonecutters’ Yard in 1916.
My brilliant Irish historian friend, Gillian O’Brien, the author of The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death and Rebellion, describes the gaol this way: “[Kilmainham is] poised somewhere between a prison and a shrine.” As such it’s a place of national memory that tells the stories of extraordinary leaders and ordinary individuals who risked everything in order to free Ireland from centuries of British occupation and tyranny.
One of those ordinary people jailed in Kilmainham was Anne Devlin, Robert Emmet’s friend and colleague.
Charged with treason for her role in Emmet’s failed rebellion, Anne was incarcerated for three years in the darkest and most dismal parts of Kilmainham. One of the places where Anne was confined was a hole void of light; it resembled an oubliette, a French place of confinement where prisoners were forgotten. Viewing that place of confinement, I wondered how anyone could survive the deprivation, the torture, the psychological terror of living in such a place, of being able to be courageous enough to never give information about Emmet or any of the other fifty or more brave souls involved in the 1803 rebellion.
Seeing where Anne was imprisoned led me to want to learn her story within its context. While conducting thorough research about the gaol and the times, I read several accounts of Anne’s time in Kilmainham but none of them conveyed what I wished to know. How did it feel to be terrorized daily, to be threatened with hanging repeatedly, to be starved, to be kept in the dark? How did she maintain her courageous stance? I knew that I needed to write her story in her own voice and convey the emotional story that has not been told.
Around the same time, I also learned about Percy Shelley’s idealistic and naïve political aspirations. When he was nineteen, after being expelled from Oxford University because of his atheism, he traveled to Ireland in 1812 with his first wife Harriet and her sister Eliza. He had learned about and admired Robert Emmet. He also learned about the plight of the Catholics in Ireland and wished to free the Irish from British tyranny. He set out to do so and saw himself as a sort of reincarnation of Emmet.
These two stories came together, and I began to imagine Percy Shelley meeting Anne Devlin in order to learn more about Robert Emmet but also to perhaps learn her story.
That’s how this novel was conceived as a “what-if” alternate historical fiction. In it, we learn about Anne’s indomitable courage, but also how Percy and Harriet are tested as their ideals clash with reality.
In these times, I hope that this novel engenders courage in all of us. We may never be imprisoned or deprived in the way Anne Devlin was, but I hope that we can learn how to be resilient in our own times of darkness.
[ Bio ]
Kathleen Williams Renk taught and wrote about British, Irish, and Women’s literature for nearly three decades in the U.S. and abroad. She writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and literary criticism. While earning her Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa, Williams Renk studied fiction writing with the Pulitzer-Prize winning author, James Alan McPherson. In November 2020, Cuidono Press (New York) published her debut novel, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley, which won Story Circle Network’s 2021 May Sarton Award in Historical Fiction. Vindicated was also a finalist for the CIBA Goethe Award and was long listed for the Chautauqua Literary Prize. In November 2023, Bedazzled Ink Publishing published her second historical fiction novel The Rossetti Diaries, as well as her third novel, No Coward Soul Have I in November 2024. In addition, Toward Her Awakening: A Novel of Kate Chopin, is forthcoming from the same press.
Williams Renk’s short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Iowa City Magazine, Literary Yard, Page and Spine, Gaia, CC & D Magazine, and Bewildering Stories. Her scholarly books include Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization (Univ. Press of Virginia,1999), Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature: The Alchemical Literary Imagination (Routledge, 2012), and Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic “Victorians” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
She lives on the Front Range in Colorado where she enjoys hiking and playing music with friends.
To learn more, please visit www.kathleenrenk.com
