by Kathleen Williams Renk

“As in her previous novels, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley and The Rossetti Diaries, Kathleen Williams Renk has crafted an absorbing new narrative that gifts readers with two keys to unlock our understanding of women’s hidden history. It immerses us within a historical setting—early 19th-century Ireland during its occupation by the British—that reveals the depths of colonial brutality wrought in unforgettable detail; and it centers our awareness within the perspective of all-but-forgotten Irish Republican Anne Devlin, who was imprisoned and tortured for years for the crime of high treason during the failed Irish Rebellion of 1803. Renk skillfully weaves the story of young Harriet Westbrook Shelley, an Irish sympathizer and the first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose dogged attempts to learn the true account of Devlin’s experiences eventually result in her own endangerment, and Devlin’s personal account of her experience in Dublin’s notorious Kilmainham Gaol. The extraordinary cost Devlin paid in keeping alive the dream of an Ireland free from British tyranny is heartbreaking for its historical obscurity. Nevertheless, the heartbreak is tempered by the author’s decision to imagine Devlin speaking across the centuries in her own, clear voice. In her epigraph to this fine novel, Renk includes a poem by Eavan Boland writing of those left ‘outside history.’ It ends with the line, ‘And we are too late. We are always too late.’ But so long as narratives like Renk’s bring to life female figures as compelling as Anne Devlin and Harriet Westbrook Shelley it is not too late.” — Carol Roh Spaulding, the award-winning author of Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories

“Blending history and fiction No Coward Soul Have I takes readers on an immersive and evocative journey through nineteenth-century Dublin. The city becomes as much a character as the poets, patriots and poor that walk its streets and tell its stories.” — Gillian O’Brien, author of The Darkness Echoing: Exploring Ireland’s Places of Famine, Death, and Rebellion and Blood Runs Green: The Murder That Transfixed Gilded Age Chicago

“Kathleen Williams Renk is an absolute master of compelling and intelligent historical fiction that carries not just the events but the people, the emotion. In No Coward’s Soul Have I, an alternate historical fiction, a type of what-if, her characters are as real as you are. This is exquisite storytelling and also immaculate research. Readers will find themselves immersed, contemplating the visceral realities of pre-famine nineteenth century Ireland, a people still engaged in a multi-century struggle to throw off the shackles of colonization. At the center of this telling appear Anne Devlin, the radical English poet, Percy Shelley; his wife Harriet; and Dublin itself. Renk truly weaves the fabric of history with a keen eye from human complexities at all ends of class and intent and nationality. Readers will find themselves not simply in the pages but on the streets and in the kitchens of Dublin, understanding the always flawed nature of human beings, of living history.” — Christina Marrocco, author of Addio, Love Monster, named Best Independent Press Novel of 2022 by the Chicago Writers Association