"The News from Ireland" hearkens back almost 150 years, to a cataclysmic event in Ireland's history: the Great Famine, which left over a million Irish dead from hunger and drove as many as two million to leave their country of birth. Many Irish peasants were dependent on the potato as their only source of food, and the blight that struck in the 1840s virtually wiped out the country's potato crop. Yet as the Irish author George Bernard Shaw pointed out in his play Man and Superman, the term "famine" was a misnomer: throughout the entire period, food products were being exported from Ireland instead of being made available to the starving population.
In "The News from Ireland," Trevor demonstrates the disparity between the starvation of the poor Irish and the comfort of Anglo-Irish who profit from their labor.
He evokes the situation through the viewpoint of outsiders who feel no real effect of the famine. Hs characters are all Protestants, the majority from England. The Pulvertafts, who have inherited an English estate in Ireland, have over the years learned to accept the inequities inherent in Ireland and no longer feel uncomfortable about the position of privilege and ease that they occupy. Their new governess, however, has some difficulty acclimating to her new surrounding and accepting such "unintentional wickedness." The story chronicles her shift to complacency, and in so doing, it raises more universal themes: the greater issues of personal and social responsibility.
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