Ghost-conjuring in Ireland’s ancient east: a paratextual reading of Mary St. John’s “Ellauna: a legend of the Thirteenth Century” (1815)

This article reads Mary St. John’s 1815 verse narrative “Ellauna: A Legend of the Thirteenth Century” to examine the troubled process of reclaiming Ireland’s medieval past in early nineteenth-century Ireland. Situating Ellauna within the tradition of the Irish national tale, the article foregrounds how verse and paratext work in concert to complicate resolution and settlement in post-Union Ireland. It argues that Ellauna enacts a form of topographical haunting whereby the Irish landscape functions both as a site of commemoration and of unresolved historical tension and emerges as a layered site of memory where personal, regional, national, and global histories converge. By reading the physical environment itself as a medium of cultural persistence and spectral unsettlement, this article seeks to expand the purview of the Irish national tale and to reconsider women’s contributions to the curation of local history in the early nineteenth century.