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'The silence of Barbara Synge' provides a fascinating companion volume to Bill McCormack's acclaimed 'Fool of the family' (2000), a biography of the playwright J.M. Synge (1871-1909).
Taking the alledged death of Mrs John Hatch (née Synge) in 1767 as a focal point, this book explores the varied strands of the Synge family tree in eighteenth and nineteenth century Ireland.
Key events in the family's history are carefully documented, including a suicide in 1769 which is echoed in an early Synge play, the effects of the famine which influenced 'The playboy of the western world' in 1907, and the behaviour of Francis Synge at the time of the union.
'The silence of Barbara Synge' is a unique work of cultural enquiry, combining archival research, literary criticism, and religious and medical history to pull the strands together and relate them to the family's literary descendent J.M. Synge.
Introducing - the Synges from Bridgnorth, Shropshire
Part 1 - Settings
1. Lands Elsewhere: Wicklow
2. Other people: The Hatches
3. A little learning
4. The Mill at Amino
5. The state of the roads
Part 2 - Hatched, matched and despatched
6. An MP and his wife
7. Death in the mountains
8. A battle of wills
9. On debt
Part 3 - The Devil's Glen
10. Roundwood and after
11. Her brother's will, 1792
12. The sceond Archdiaconate
13. Rebellion, union and family romance
Part 4 - Affairs with the moon
14. How Pestalozzi reached Wicklow
15. Melmoth, the Stay-at-Home
16. In Darby's field
Part 5 - Literature at nurse
17. John Hatch, a country doctor
18. Windfalls
19. Work house insurgency
Part 6 - Concerning J.M. Synge (1871-1909)
20. Madness and local government
21. Insulting 'The Playboy'
22. A county in romance
23. The wounded dramatist takes his bow