In 2007, when I presented my first work on modernist afterlives in Irish women’s fiction at a Dublin conference, I was informed by an eminent colleague that there was no such thing as a woman Irish modernist writer, ever. Later, when I began my book Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode, I met roadblocks on the way to publication, of the type I had never encountered before turning my attention to women writers. Without apology, publishers doubted interest in an academic book on this subject, and I received peculiar editorial suggestions, among them that my study should fold in male writers.
Of note, such feedback came after Anne Enright , and then Anna Burns , had won the Booker Prize . Now this introduction might be dismissed as sulking, which is apt because if anything will embitter you, it is researching and writing a history of Irish women’s writing. However, it’s difficult to take such gatekeeping personally when you’re watching Elizabeth Bowen dismissed by her peers as a “reductio ad absurdum” of Henry James , or seeing Edna O’Brien described as a “whore” for her modernist experiments, or citing Seán Ó Faoláin as he asserts, in 1984, that there is no such genre as the Irish novel, despite the thousands written and published by Irish women across the past two centuries.
Why the hostility towards Irish women’s fiction, particularly when engaged with modernism? READ MORE An American on the Irish sense of humour: ‘I.
