An unusually long-running extra-mural literature course at Queen's University had, by 1990, acquired such a cult status that a journalist from the Daily Telegraph arrived in Belfast to interview the lecturer with an engaging passion for her subject. The subsequent article about Edith Newman Devlin, a former college tutor, attracted the attention of a London publisher who suggested she should write a book about her life.
Ten years on, the course continues (one student makes the journey from Dublin each week), while Newman Devlin, now 73, has just had that book published by Blackstaff. (The original deal fell through.) It is not based on her experiences in Queen's where she tutored in English and French until her retirement at 65, rather the story concentrates on her childhood spent in the Dublin of the 1930s and 1940s.
It makes neither romantic nor nostalgic reading. Devlin's story is as much graphic social history as the personal memoir of a traumatised girl who lost her mother at a young age and sought a life through reading. Born Edith Gaw in 1926, the youngest of five children, her early life was lived in relentless cultural confusion. "We were poor Protestants which wasn't easy. It was as if we weren't quite Irish. We were different. I'd have to say I wasn't aware so much of being Protestant as of not being Catholic."
Whereas there were religious statues and pictures to be found in the homes of her Catholic friends, a portrait of Queen Victoria hung on the Gaw parlour wall. "She might have been the Queen of China for all she meant for us," she recalls, adding that her father had mourned the death of King George V and went to London to stand among the crowds for the coronation of George VI.
Hugh Gaw, who joined the Royal Navy at 17, and would later serve in the first World War, at sea, was born and raised in Newtownards, Co Down of strict Presbyterian stock. As the years passed he rejected this, settling into what his youngest daughter describes as "militant Protestant agnosticism". Bitterly opposed to the prevailing Catholic culture surrounding him in Dublin, he appears to have lived his life in a state of siege. To her, her father was always an outsider, "he thought of himself as English".
Her father's behaviour did not inspire confidence in her. The young Edith Gaw felt an outsider and often hid the fact she wasn't Catholic. "If you lived in a big house in Dalkey or Rathgar or Rathmines, it was fine to be Protestant. But Protestants were expected to be rich, not poor like we were, living in the city surrounded by Catholics who were even poorer than we were."
It was all a long time ago, another world. "The poverty was incredible. Angela's Ashes is no exaggeration. The poverty at that time was simply that bad. People did live in appalling conditions. At least we had food to eat and clean clothes. But the dirt, the filth people lived in, with not even the water to wash themselves. Everyone had lice and scabies - even us, with our strict Royal Navy cleanliness. All you had to do was sit on a tram beside someone who did and you picked it up."
Edith Newman Devlin seems settled, even content. She is a lively, inquisitive character, eager to discuss international fiction and far more relaxed than the formal, rather literary tone of her memoirs might suggest. There is a decided romantic streak in her character. Her voice is soft, her accent if not quite Belfast, is definitely Northern and far from Dublin by now, although she looks amazed on being told this, convinced: "I have a Southern accent". Not anymore. Her turns of speech and gestures however are an interesting combination of Belfast and Dublin.
Her home, where she lives with her husband Denis Devlin, a former professor of English at Queen's, is a fine redbrick Victorian house in an established Belfast suburb, not far from the university. It was here they raised their three children. The house, decorated with flamboyance and flair, means a lot to her. Most of the colours are bold - the yellow of the hall, stairs and landing is a colour they saw in Monet's house in France and liked so much they brought it home.
As a girl in Dublin, there was no family home as such. "We lived in the gate lodge of St Patricks, then known as a madhouse or lunatic asylum." She spent her first 17 years at the lodge where her father's job consisted of monitoring the movements of everyone entering and leaving the hospital. Every passage in and out of the building was recorded and entered into a ledger. "When the bell rang at the lodge, he rose, took the keys from the hook inside the parlour door, went out and inquired the business of the caller; he opened the small gate for pedestrians and the big, double gate for cars and horsedrawn vehicles."
The family moved there when she was two months old. Prior to that, they had lived in Swords, in the school where her mother taught. When her mother was appointed to another post, this time in the city, the family moved, but accommodation was not included. This problem was solved when her father secured the job at St Patrick's, where the Gaw children also experienced the responsibility of tending the gate.
Her memoirs make grim reading; her childhood seems to have been a place where there was no love, no music, little light. Instead, there was the constant hectoring of her cold, domineering father. She agrees. "He did dominate our lives, we were not expected to think. I never allowed any loud voices in my home here. I couldn't abide the idea of it."
Is she bitter or cynical? "No, not at all. I wish I had known my mother. I have tried so hard to find out about her. I'm tender-hearted, I like to think I am like my mother. I love animals. I've always thought you can tell a lot about people by the way they treat animals." Like her mother, she would teach and says of her extra-mural course. "I love it, I don't have to retire from it. Together, my students and I - I have about 450 - travel the world through books."
Aside from shadowy fragments of a presence who never quite becomes a complete individual, her abiding memory of her mother Eva Newman, who came from a Church of Ireland family in Bantry, Co Cork, is of being forced by her father to view her corpse. "I remember screaming. It was terrifying." Her mother died nine days before Edith's fifth birthday. "She had had cancer and was very emaciated. She no longer looked like herself. She had become a stranger. Her face was so thin and yellow. Every time I think of her, the image which comes to mind is of her lying dead, her face a mask. But my father thought it had to be done, that it was important to say a last goodbye. It was a dreadful thing to do. I would never force that on a child."
After her death, no one mentioned her. "I asked my brothers and sister, but they didn't want to talk about it. My father never mentioned her. It was as if she never existed."
Devlin's memories of Dublin are vivid, yet each anecdote invariably gives way to further speculation about her father's distant personality. "It was as if he couldn't feel. He never tried to understand our feelings. He ruled our house. He was a tyrant, a bully. He was the enemy. There was only happiness, a bit of music, if he was out. When he came back, everything changed." Did she love him? "No, I can't say that I did and I was not upset when he died. You can't manufacture feelings."
Feeling, and the ability to understand the feelings of others, is, she says, the thesis of her book. There are long passages dealing with 19th-century writers she loves, from Austen to George Eliot and particularly Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with whom she closely identified. These chapters sit uneasily in the memoir, but she disputes this: "these books were very important to me and my life. They were my way of understanding".
As the youngest of five children Edith was for a time her father's pet and enjoyed riding about the city on the crossbar of his bike. But as time passed, she found his personality increasingly oppressive. The more she talks about her cold, proud, clever father, the more obvious it becomes that he inspires more regret than bitterness.
Even now, so many years after his death - he died at 85 in 1964 - she admits she is still trying to understand him. He was extremely well read and had a love of books which he certainly passed on to her.
Although little importance was put on their emotional needs, she stresses her father's efforts to educate his children. "When you consider it, it was a huge burden. There he was, left with five children to raise and educate." By sheer force of will, he ensured they all received good educations and she makes the point, "You know at that time, an education was not enough. If you wanted a job, you had to have the education and someone to nominate you. And my father managed that as well." Gaw was strict, he was also a compulsive worrier. "Eight pints of milk a day and seven tons of coal a year went with the job. But he always fretted about using up the coal and don't forget coal was used for everything - for cooking as well as heating and for heating the water for washing the clothes."
The Gaws were poor but, as she points out, many were even poorer. The first of many maids came to work for the family when her mother was dying, and her father's difficult nature ensured there would be a succession. Several of these working women are described in the book, some with fondness, particularly Ann who worked for the family for eight years and was herself a poor Protestant from Co Meath. "She was my best friend; she worked hard at making my life as easy as possible and protected me from rows with my father." In time, however, Devlin's father found a weak link, Ann's boyfriend, and attacked. She left. As did they all.
No-one could describe Speaking Volumes, which began its life about 10 years ago, as a vengeful act against her father's memory, but she does mention that her siblings, two of whom are still alive, were upset by her having written about their childhood. There is no sense in the book of the children being particularly close and she agrees this was so.
Modern Ireland took shape around people of her generation. At six, the year after her mother's death, a huge event took place. The World Eucharistic Congress came to Dublin in 1932. The huge procession was to pass the gate of the lodge. The children were excited. Mr Gaw was outraged and "forbade us on pain of death to look at it". They did though, from the roof of the shed in the backyard. It was an impressive sight.
"Sensational and spectacular as was that never-ending colour, sound and smell" she writes, "we Protestants looked on as outsiders to the joy of the Irish people."
All the while her sense of class was developing. On leaving the Diocesan School, she went to Alexandra College where she became even more embarrassed by her address, but did well academically.
Some months later, she entered Trinity College to study French and English. There she met her husband. On graduating, she began a doctorate, but did not complete it, having run into difficulties with her supervisor at the Sorbonne.
Soon after her marriage in 1952, she and her husband moved to Oxford and later to Scotland, before settling in Belfast. Her father spent his final six years with her. It is a period she does not write about in the book.
She has lived in Belfast since 1962 and her world has been largely that of Queen's University. As a staff tutor, she was always a working wife and says, "there were those who saw me as an unnatural mother".
Of the situation in the North she says: "I am interested and sympathetic to all sides who are locked up in this cul-de-sac of history." Even now she feels, as a Southerner, she is not the right person to comment. Meanwhile the literature lectures continue: "I'll do them till I drop".
Speaking Volumes - A Dublin Childhood by Edith Newman Devlin is published by Blackstaff at £12.50.
