Irish Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This collection presents international research on the work of Irish women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. Discovering new voices and introducing original perspectives on the lives, works and networks of more familiar literary figures, these essays make a key contribution to contemporary feminist recovery projects and remapping the landscape of Irish literature of this period.

There is a burgeoning interdisciplinary and international field in which a diverse range of hitherto neglected Irish women writers have been recovered, and their lives, works, networks and other contexts illuminated.  Irish Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century capitalises on this rich, diverse and innovative field, drawing on new scholarship that develops existing strands of enquiry further. It also opens up new avenues for exploration.

The strengths of the work is in its seeking of new engagements specifically in relation to Irish women’s cultural economies, particularly literary networks, access to literary production and publication, the long nineteenth century and emergent modernist aesthetics. A further key concern is the politics of retrieval of lost women’s lives and writings, the relationship of Irish feminist critical projects to the ongoing acts of commemoration associated with the formation of the Irish state, and increasing concerns with the future-proofing of ‘lost’ feminist digital recovery projects of the 1990s.

This new collection of original work offers new scholarship about these concerns in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Irish women’s writing. It draws attention to the significant figure of the Irish New Woman, feminism in the archives, vegetarianism and suffrage, anthologies and the canon, literary and publishing networks, digital methodologies, and women’s writing and intellectual journals, newspaper and periodical histories.

Waking The Feminists, a movement campaigning for better female representation in the arts was established in Ireland in 2015. The launch of ‘Fired!’, a ‘convergence of practising women poets and academics responding to the publication of The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017) protested against the exclusion of Irish women poets generally from the literary canon, including many who were popular and prolific during the nineteenth century.

Two recently held events – ‘Irish Women Playwrights and Theatremakers’ (2017) and the symposium, “Occluded Narratives: Researching Irish Women’s Writing (2016) - foregrounded the interest in these areas and the plenitude of new research. The present book draws on work first presented at the editors’ symposium, “Occluded Narratives: Researching Irish Women’s Writing (1880-1910)” (May Immaculate College, Limerick 2016) where the Irish Women’s Writers Network was also launched.

CONTENTS:

New Perspectives

Maureen O’Connor, Nation and Nature in the Work of First-Wave Irish Feminists

Seán Hewitt, Emily Lawless: The Child as Natural Historian

 Christopher Cusack, Sunk in the Mainstream: Irish Women Writers and Famine Memory, 1892-1910

Whitney Standlee, ‘Emigrants-Beware!’: M. E. Francis’s The Story of Mary Dunne (1913), White Slavery and the Myth of the Ruined Woman

Lia Mills, A Country of the Mind: Eva Gore-Booth and the Easter Rising, 1916

Kate Louise Mathis,  ‘Dividing many spirits from their peace’: The voices of Deirdre in the poetry and drama of Eva Gore-Booth and Moírín Cheavasa

Julie Anne Stevens, International Relations in the Writing and Artwork of Edith Œ Somerville and Martin Ross

Anne Jamison, ‘Land, Hunting and the Irish New Girl: Edith Somerville’s “Little Red Riding Hood in Kerry”’

Matthew Reznicek, A Thing of Possibilities: The Railroad and Cosmopolitical Belonging in Thurston’s Max

Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka, ‘Modernist Silence’ in Irish New Woman Fiction

Recoveries

Heidi Hansson, Intellectual Journals and the Irish Women Writer: The Case of the Nineteenth Century 1877-1900

Elke D’hoker, Anglo-Irish Relations in the Short Stories of Ethel Colburn Mayne

Mary Pierse, Rediscovering Elizabeth Priestley: spirited writer, feminist, and suffragist.

Patrick Maume,  Education, Love, Loneliness, Philanthropy: The Ambivalences of Erminda Rintoul Esler

Lindsay Janssen,  From Special Correspondence to Fiction: Memory and Veracity in Margaret McDougall’s Writings on Ireland

Barry Montgomery, Hannah Berman (1885-1955): Jewish Lithuania and the Irish Literary Revival

Lisa Weihman, Mothers of the Insurrection: Theodosia Hickey’s Easter Week

Nadia Smith, Retrieving Rosamond Jacob’s Early Unpublished Novels