Books on Margaret Evans and Sophia Parnell-Evans by Gerard Ronan Launched 

The books on Margaret and Sophia Evans have sprung from Gerard Ronan’s investigation into the circumstances underpinning the construction of the Round Tower at Portrane

Gerard Ronan is a 60 year old retired civil servant and the author of three previous books: The Round Towers of Fingal and William Kelly of Portrane, published in 2019, and The Irish Zorro, which was published in hardback in 2004 and he was one of the key participants in a 2011 National Geographic Documentary based largely on that book as part of the Mystery Files TV series.  The documentary is still repeated occasionally on the National Geographic and Smithsonian TV channels.  The Irish Zorro has also featured twice on RTE’s ‘The Book on One’ radio programme, the first time from 6th to 10th December 2004 and then again from 17th to 21st May 2010 and on a Newstalk Radio documentary on June 2nd and 3rd 2019. He lives in Donabate.

Mayor of Fingal Cllr Eoghan O’Brien commented: “These two books, as well as telling the story behind the construction of the iconic Portrane Round Tower, will provide an excellent insight into the lives of these two exceptional women and also to life in the late 18th and early 19th century in Portrane and beyond.”

Margaret Geraghty, Director of Housing and Community said “Fingal County Council, through our Library Service, is delighted to support the publication of books such as these which provide information on life in Fingal in times past, and I know they will be of great interest.”

Senior Executive Librarian, Helen O’Donnell said “It is fitting that these books about two extraordinary Irish women are being launched the same week as International Women’s Day which will be celebrated this year on Sunday 8th March.”  

MARGARET EVANS (1750-1846) - Poet of Portrane

Arrested on charge of high treason for his role in the rebellion of 1798, Hampden Evans of Portrane House was facing the death penalty until a reprieve saw him exiled for life.  His wife (Margaret) and daughters were forced to follow him and spend 12 difficult years moving from Germany to France and rented house to rented house, until finally allowed to return. Separated from her sons and sisters, Margaret Evans had to develop new friends, in a new city, where attitudes to female emancipation were far more progressive than in the city of her birth.  Her poems betray the thoughts of a woman battling to appreciate her blessings in the face of continuous re-settlement and the deaths of her children.  The type of comfort and emotional support that she cannot extract from her husband, she seeks in the friendship of other women, the pages of her Bible, and the mental discipline of poetry.  Written, almost entirely, to or for other women, these poems speak not just to her affection for her children and her female friends, but to the pivotal role of poetry in the lives of eighteenth and early nineteenth century women. Her poems give us a unique insight into the life and exile of a Protestant, and very prominent United Irish family.

SOPHIA PARNELL-EVANS (1780-1853) - Feminism, Politics and Farming in 19th Century Portrane

Sophia Parnell-Evans was the only daughter of Sir John Parnell and the great aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell. She ran a large and successful farming enterprise at a time when few women had done so.  She met two Queens, the ex-wife of Napoleon and was a friend of the radical feminist Margaret King.  A friend of both the Darwin and Condorcet families, she was daughter and sister to three of the most prominent politicians of her day, and wife to another.  A radical and liberal thinker in her own right, she founded two primary schools in Donabate and helped to mitigate the effects of the Great Famine in her locality.  She funded and encouraged the agricultural experiments of William Kelly of Portrane.  The memorial round tower and marble bust she built in memory of her devoted husband, the MP George Evans, revived a tradition of tower building that had lain dormant for seven centuries.  As the great aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, she even made it into the pages of Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake" as the practical joker "greataunt Sophy".  The bust she had made of her husband which was originally housed at the tower now sits in garden of her husband’s great nephew in North Wales.