In Marian O'Shea Wernicke’s latest novel, Irish teenager Eileen O’Donovan is forced to marry an older widower she barely knows.
“She loves books, she loves to study, and she's not ready for marriage — so she's horrified,” Wernicke said. The St. Louis native said she wrote O’Donovan as a 16-year-old because that was the age at which Wernicke’s great-grandmother was forced to marry.
“I had the skeleton of the plot from the few facts that I knew about my great-grandmother,” she said.
“Out of Ireland,” released this week, tells the story of O’Donovan and her brother, Michael, who is in danger after participating in an Irish Republican Brotherhood attack against a British garrison. The pair leave Ireland in the late 1860s and end up making their way to St. Louis.
Wernicke drew information from the novel from her great-grandmother’s story, though she had to fill in the details.
“I had to imagine her inner life: what was a kid, a young woman like this, feeling and undergoing — and what spunk it took for her to make this change,” she said.
The novel also dives into the history of St. Louis’ notorious Irish gangs through Michael’s story. “He's involved in crime when he gets to St. Louis,” she said. “That was a part of the novel I really had to research because I wasn't aware of these Irish gangs. … They were very powerful, the Hogan gang [and] the Egan gang.”
Wernicke hopes that reading about the courage of a 19th-century (semi)-fictional Irish teenager and her older brother gives readers a better appreciation and understanding of what immigrants face today.
“[Most people in the U.S.] came as immigrants, [and] we've kind of forgotten that,” Wernicke said. She encourages people to reflect on “how their ancestors came, the bravery it took and the bad conditions it took for them to want to escape from those countries.”
Wernicke joined Monday’s St. Louis on the Air to discuss “Out of Ireland” and its real-world inspirations. Listen to the conversation on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast or Stitcher or by clicking the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Avery Rogers is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr. Send questions and comments about this story to talk@stlpr.org.
