The year 1922 marks the coming into being of the Irish Free State in the South of Ireland. This is merely a confirmation of the December 1920 ‘Government of Ireland Act’, passed in the British House of Commons, which provided for the partition of Ireland with two parliaments, North and South. Such legal manoeuvrings occurred parallel to the War of Independence (1918–21) and the subsequent Civil War (1922–23). It is, as John Wilson Foster remarks, a confusing time. While historical dates suggest an uncomplicated worldview of steady progress – a stark moment of before and after – the reality, of course, is that day-to-day life is messy and progress is far from seamless. The novel form, particularly, is best poised to explore that muddled reality. In many ways, in an Irish context, the kind of boundary-making that partition implied, the sense of different spheres of experience and influence – different worlds – permeates into the cultural realm. In other words, there is a serious disconnect between the newly formed state that has come into being and the art being produced within the state: a critical disjunction between a public sense of history and the private exposure to the trauma of change. Perhaps this is the case in all places, but in Ireland, because of the quite conscious intertwining of national and cultural interests through the revivalist period, this disconnect is particularly telling.