Susan returns Frank’s engagement ring

Susan McGahern’s return of Francis (Frank) McGahern’s engagement ring in May 1932 turned a prolonged, uncertain engagement into an immediate confrontation and a renewed promise of marriage. The gesture did not end their relationship: Frank was back in Ballinamore the following day, and Susan eventually agreed to an August wedding. But the ring’s return made visible the strain that seven years of delay had allowed to accumulate, and altered the course of the courtship at once.

Background to the return

The engagement began before Frank’s transfer from Ballinamore to Burtonport. The young guards were regularly moved between stations because of political unrest, and distance became a persistent condition of the couple’s relationship. Over the years Frank was posted to different parts of the country and had affairs with other women. Susan remained in Ballinamore, teaching at Lisacarn School and helping Maggie in the shop. She had admirers, including a young teacher who was in love with her, but treated the engagement ring as binding as plain gold.

By the time Susan returned the ring, the engagement had lasted seven years. The memoir does not settle on a single explanation for her decision. John McGahern considers rumours about Frank’s other women, the possibility that Susan herself had become interested in someone else, and pressure from family and friends over the engagement’s inordinate length. He thinks all three may have contributed, while acknowledging that family talk about such matters is vague and liable to evaporate. What he regards as certain is that she did not return the ring merely for effect. The act was consequential because it made the unresolved state of the relationship impossible to leave undisturbed.

The immediate reversal

Frank’s response overturned the pattern of postponement. He had often found excuses to delay visiting Susan; after she returned the ring, he was in Ballinamore the very next day. He did not leave until she agreed to marry him in August. The sequence is strikingly compressed: a relationship that had endured years of distance and delay reached a decision within a day of the returned ring. Susan’s act did not secure a wedding by itself, but it forced Frank to confront the prospect that the engagement might not continue on its existing terms.

The memoir describes Frank as both incensed and shaken. Once Susan had agreed to marry him, he wanted to give the ring back immediately. She refused. In her account of the coming marriage, the engagement ring was no longer something to be handed back and forth: with God’s help, they would marry in August, and he would then give her a plain gold wedding band. Her refusal marks a further change in the exchange. She had returned the ring to challenge the stalled engagement; after Frank’s return and promise, she would not let his urgency turn the engagement ring itself into an instant remedy. The wedding band remained the expected next step.

Letters and the courtship after the rupture

The surviving correspondence gives the event a practical aftermath. The letters Susan wrote from Ballinamore to Frank in Shanaglish, where he was stationed in Galway, are the only record of their relationship. In the months leading to the wedding they deal largely with arrangements: the letters of freedom Frank needed to obtain, the place of the wedding, the honeymoon, their clothes, and their guests. Their administrative detail registers how quickly the relationship moved from a disputed engagement to planning a marriage.

The letters also convey Susan’s happiness. In 1932, the year of the Eucharistic Congress, she wrote about spending a day in a convent listening to its broadcast on the Athlone station. She also went on pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory on Lough Derg to ask God’s blessing on the marriage. After the vigil, she described feeling low, noted the black tea and brown water, and then said she felt happy. The pilgrimage and the domestic wedding preparations belong to the same period: a marriage being made concrete through both religious observance and practical arrangements.

The correspondence also records a smaller quarrel that followed Frank’s return. While visiting Susan and Maggie’s shared bedroom on High Street, he noticed a jar of expensive powder on Susan’s dressing table. Back in Shanaglish, he accused her of extravagance. Susan explained that the powder had been given to Maggie by Annie Reynolds, and that she sometimes shook a little onto her hands to prevent perspiration; she said it had lasted a long time and that she neither used nor could afford such powder. John McGahern presents Frank’s accusation as a defensive shift to a subject on which he thought he had the advantage. Its place beside the engagement correspondence shows that the renewed promise did not remove the couple’s old frictions, even as Susan answered his accusation with a specific explanation.

Significance within the account

The returned ring is a compact turning point in the parents’ courtship: a material object that had signified Susan’s commitment became the means by which she challenged the engagement’s indefinite delay. The memoir preserves both sides of that change. Frank, who had postponed visits, responded with immediate presence and a demand for a decision; Susan, who had treated the ring as binding, used its return to make the cost of continued postponement unmistakable. His insistence on giving it back at once and her refusal show that the change was not simply a reversal of positions, but a negotiation over what the ring could mean after the crisis.

The event also shapes how the later letters are read. Their practical lists and expressions of happiness follow an episode that had made marriage uncertain, while the later argument over powder suggests that reconciliation did not erase their disagreements. The account does not claim that the ring’s return alone explains the wedding or resolves the couple’s difficulties. It establishes something narrower and more decisive: after seven years of delay, Susan’s action brought Frank back to Ballinamore and secured his agreement to marry her in August.