Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor
"Ghost light. An ancient superstition among people of the stage. One lamp must always be left burning when the theatre is dark, so the ghosts can perform their own plays."
Molly Allgood was engaged to John Millington Synge when he died. She was an actress in the Abbey and was the first actress to play the iconic role of Pegeen Mike in Synge's masterpiece The Playboy of the Western World, playing to an angry rioting crowd incensed by this portrayal of themselves. We begin this book with Molly living in a "hungry room", her neighbours largely Irish navvies, her company largely poured from bottles and "the scuttle of the past out of cupboards.". It is almost a return to her girlhood over a junkshop in Mary Street in the infamous tenements of Dublin.
Molly's final residence is like Yeat's "foul rag and bone shop of the heart" and she swims among her memories, which are dominated by her years with Synge. Synge was a Protestant from a landowning family and almost twenty years older than Molly. The gulf between them was large and their relationship (in this novel) was not looked kindly upon by Synge's partners in the Abbey, Yeats and Lady Gregory, nor Synge's widowed mother. O'Connor imagines them meeting on the train to Bray, not acknowledging each other until they thought themselves safe from being seen by those who knew them, to avoid scandal.
