Margaret Kelleher

Writing Irish Women's Literary History

It is, however, not generally recognised how much of verse of high intellectual and artistic quality has been written by women during the last two centuries. One or two names have a high place on the roll of fame; others are rewarded with honourable if somewhat patronising mention and approval; and many whose productions are of a quality exceptionally noteworthy are totally forgotten, or—as in the case of living authors—strangely, and one is inclined to say, ungenerously neglected.

The Irish Renaissance, 1890–1940: drama in English

The Irish Literary Revival defined itself in part as an abstention from the English literary tradition, and this included the ‘English novel’, using the term in a generic as well as national sense. After all, it was thought by some Irish cultural nationalists that the English novel written by Irish novelists had tended to demean Ireland, perpetuating in the middle and late nineteenth century a view of the island that Yeats acidly referred to as the ‘humourist’s Arcadia’. In any case, the kinds of stories, characters, themes and literary styles that the Revivalists wished to resuscitate or invent did not suggest the novel as their best vehicle, and so the novel did not fare as well as poetry and drama once the Revival got under way. The Revival thought of itself as returning to the past to achieve a beginning, so its exponents and promoters paid little attention to the Irish Victorian novel which continued through the 1890s and into the Edwardian decade and beyond. In our own day, literary historians of the period have maintained this inattention. The Revival has retained its centrality and while this has permitted consideration of a counter-Revival (see, for example, three sections so titled in the third volume of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing , 1991), creditable Irish writing that neither promoted nor repudiated the Revival has been neglected. The ‘English connection’ in literature and society has been ignored. Yet despite the Home Rule movement, the Irish-Ireland movement, the republican movement (and Easter 1916), the setting up of the Free State in 1922 and the later declaration of the Republic, relations between Ireland and Britain continued, with their direct and indirect literary and cultural expressions, but find little or no place in the story of Irish fiction.

Prose writing and drama in English, 1830–1890: from Catholic emancipation to the fall of Parnell

The 1830s have been termed by some commentators as the decade in which Irish fiction faced collapse, and, in support of this view, critics commonly cite a letter written by Maria Edgeworth in 1834, the year in which Helen , her last novel, was published. Writing from her home in Edgeworthstown to her brother Michael Pakenham Edgeworth in India, the novelist observed: ‘It is impossible to draw Ireland as she now is in a book of fiction – realities are too strong, party passions too violent to bear to see, or care to look at their faces in the looking-glass. The people would only break the glass, and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature – distorted nature, in a fever.’ As chapters 8 and 10 by Ross and Connolly have shown, by 1830 Ireland was well established as a locale for fiction and Irish fiction was firmly embedded within emerging definitions of realism – trends exemplified by the success of Edgeworth’s writings. While the remarks quoted above spell the end of her own novel-writing career, they greatly underestimate the tenacity of Irish fiction. Five years earlier, in an address ‘to the reader’ which prefaced her Book of the Boudoir (1829), Sydney Owenson had delivered a more accurate prediction of the future for Irish writing: ‘Among the multitudinous effects of catholic emancipation, I do not hesitate to predict a change in the character of Irish authorship.’ However, with the exception of the much-cited William Carleton and the undervalued George Moore, the period of 1830 to 1890 is still not readily identifiable through major prose writers or dramatists, and many of the most popular authors of the time – Charles Lever, Anna Maria Hall and Hubert O’Grady, for example – fared badly in subsequent criticism.

Contemporary prose in English: 1940–2000

Introduction At first glance, the outlook for literary work in the Ireland of 1940 was not propitious. The international situation’s constriction of the English publishing industry, on which most Irish writers depended for a living, together with the constraints placed on domestic literary activity, created an environment that was unpromising, to say the least. In the case of imaginative prose, the prospects appeared to be particularly gloomy, with silence and exile the ostensible order of the day. The departure into exile of Samuel Beckett, in 1939, and Francis Stuart, in 1940, was accompanied by the silence created by Joyce’s death in 1941. And the self-imposed silence and internal exile of Flann O’Brien following the 1941 rejection of his second novel, The Third Policeman (published posthumously in 1967), also made it difficult for the Irish novel to sustain the international reputation it enjoyed in the inter-war period. For Irish novelists the absence of such figures, and of the possibility of a genuinely independent Irish novel their innovative work exemplified, gave rise to problems of continuity and change both conceptually and thematically. In addition to World War II threatening the loss of audiences outside Ireland, the rigorous enforcement of the Censorship of Publications Act – mainly directed against prose works – ensured that much new writing failed to reach an Irish audience (the 1941 banning of novels by Frank O’Connor ( Dutch Interior ) and Kate O’Brien ( The Land of Spices ) are cases in point). Novelistic productivity in the 1940s was generally low, and novelists in the Irish Free State proved reluctant to engage imaginatively with what was known as the Emergency (this was not true of either Northern Ireland novelists or of short-story writers in the Free State).

The Irish Famine: History and Representation

Historical estimates of the mortality caused by the Great Famine of 1845–51 have varied widely, from a figure of half a million to that of one and a half million.3 In recent years, a figure in excess of one million famine deaths, around 1.1 million, has gained general acceptance among historians.4 The population of Ireland in 1845 was eight and a half million approximately, by 1851 this had declined to six and a half million. ‘When estimates of “natural” growth are taken into account, the “missing” total of some 2,400,000, or more than a quarter of the country’s population’, notes historian Peter Gray, this two and a half million ‘missing’ a combination of famine mortality and emigration.5 While the consensus as to the extent of mortality is welcome, and arbitrates between some of the excesses of nationalistic and revisionist famine historiography (to be discussed later), a fundamental challenge remains for all commentators and students of this event. Is historical comprehension, and imaginative apprehension, possible with regard to the nature and scale of this disaster, the deaths of over one million individuals, and the departure, within six years, of one in four people?

Afterword: Irish-language literature in the new millennium

Who would be a soothsayer? In tales of yore Cassandra was fated to be ignored, her warnings spurned, before eventually being put to death. Prophecy is always a dangerous business. In 1991 Reg Hindley, an English geographer, proclaimed ‘The Death of the Irish Language’. He was following a long, if not exactly glorious, tradition in his declaration of doom. The demise of the Irish language has been much prophesied over the past hundred years and yet the language has managed to stumble on, sometimes with an energising burst of verve and vigour such as was seen with the explosion of the Innti generation on to the poetic scene, or post-Hindley, with the burst of creativity occasioned by the establishment in 1996 of the first Irish-language television station, Teilifis na Gaeilge , now known as TG4. The continued growth and success of Gaelscoileanna , Irish-language medium primary schools, situated in the main in urban centres outside the traditional Gaeltachtai (official Irish-speaking areas), might also be mentioned in this context. In a further rebuttal to Hindley’s view, more recent linguistic scholarship into language death would dispute that Irish be included in the astonishing and alarming number of world languages already moribund or in imminent danger of extinction. Writing in 1997, the linguist James McCloskey stated that contrary to all the harbingers of doom, Irish, according to the criteria established in the latest linguistic studies, was in the 10 per cent of world languages considered to be ‘safe’: ‘there is little chance that Irish will become moribund (at least in the technical sense) in the next hundred years.