Caroline Jackson | Contributors to Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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Caroline Jackson lives in Cambridge. She remembers childhood holidays in
Ireland and grown-up life as a lawyer. She now happily attempts to fulfill her
children’s creative fibs about their mother’s literary endeavors.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

article by, [28] 73; [71] 84; [82] 43

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Desert Daring-do

Caroline Jackson on P. C. Wren, Beau Geste

‘Seriously?’ said the obstetrician as she departed the delivery room. In fairness, she had just delivered our firstborn, for which all is forgiven. The happy news was only marginally eclipsed, therefore, by her reaction to our new son’s name.

Out with the Galloping Major

Caroline Jackson on Somerville and Ross, Some Experiences of an Irish RM

On one of my more recent trips to Ireland, I took a detour through County Waterford to visit Lismore Castle. Towering over the steep, wooded banks of the Blackwater, it was built nearly 900 years ago by an English prince, was once owned by Sir Walter Raleigh and has been the Irish seat of the Dukes of Devonshire since the eighteenth century. The castle is a fairytale sight but what caught my eye, given pride of place on one distinctly ancient and sturdy-looking wall, was a plaque. Said wall, it explained, replaced one that had collapsed ‘for no apparent reason’. No more, no less. I was, briefly, bemused; on reflection, quite the opposite. That precise phrase recurs, to pointed and poignant effect, in Troubles, J. G. Farrell’s sublime tragicomedy about the dying days of Ireland’s Protestant Ascendancy. As I sheltered from the rain, by now rather less soft than it’s fabled to be, in the lee of that notable wall, it struck me as the perfect summation of the entire Anglo-Irish predicament.

The Girl from the Bogs

Caroline Jackson on the novels of Molly Keane

When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its success, calling it ‘too extraordinary’. But this extravagant tone was neither archness nor Mitfordian flippancy (although, appropriate to her upbringing, she exhibited a strong, unsnobbish belief in the value of taste). She meant it. Molly Keane (1904–96) never considered herself a writer: ‘It’s all a great surprise to me – if you were to give me some old book of mine I’d read it with great surprise as though I had no connection with it at all.’

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