Mairin Mitchell lived an extraordinary life in often troubled times. Born in England in 1895 to an Irish father and an English mother, she would, as a student in London in the 1910s, break with conventionality and immerse herself in a lively underground culture of anarchism, feminism, mysticism and Irish republicanism before embarking on a bohemian life of travel and writing. Her most important book, the 1937 Storm Over Spain, describes a country on the brink of Civil War. Praised at the time by George Orwell, Kate O’Brien and former Labour leader turned militant pacifist George Lansbury, it has nonetheless been long out of print. This new edition from Arlen House, the first in English since 1937, reflects a recent revival of interest in Mitchell and her work in Ireland, Spain and the Basque Country. Martin Tyrrell, the book’s co-editor, will introduce this assured account of a nation in crisis and describe Mitchell’s life and writing in the fragmenting Europe of the 1930s. 

Martin Tyrrell is the author of From Class War to Cold War-Orwell’s enduring socialism (Athabasca University Press, 2026) and co-editor of the new, Arlen House edition of Mairin Mitchell’s Storm Over Spain, originally published in 1937. He is contributing editor to the academic journal, George Orwell Studies, former arts editor of the long-running Belfast magazine, Fortnight, and a regular contributor to the Dublin Review of Books.