This study pairs selected Irish and British women novelists of three periods, relating their voices to the women's movements in their respective nations. In the first wave, nationalist and militant ideologies competed with the suffrage fight in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September illustrates the melancholy of gender performance and confusion of ethnic identity in the dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. In England, suffrage ideologies clashed with socialism and patriotism. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway contains a political unconscious that links its characters across class and gender. In the second wave, heterosexual romantic relationships come under scrutiny. Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy reveals ways in which Irish Catholic ideologies abject femaleness; her characters internalize this abjection to the point of self-destruction. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook pits the protagonist's aspirations to write novels against the Communist Party's prohibitions on bourgeois values. In the third wave, Irish writers express the frustrations of their cultural identity. Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes her protagonist back to Ireland to heal her psychic wounds. In England, Thatcherism had created a materialistic culture that eroded many feminists' socialist values. Fay Weldon's Big Woman satirizes the demise of second-wave idealism, asking where feminism can go from here.

This study pairs selected Irish and British women novelists of three periods, relating their voices to the women's movements in their respective nations. In the first wave, nationalist and militant ideologies competed with the suffrage fight in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September illustrates the melancholy of gender performance and confusion of ethnic identity in the dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. In England, suffrage ideologies clashed with socialism and patriotism. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway contains a political unconscious that links its characters across class and gender. In the second wave, heterosexual romantic relationships come under scrutiny. Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy reveals ways in which Irish Catholic ideologies abject femaleness; her characters internalize this abjection to the point of self-destruction. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook pits the protagonist's aspirations to write novels against the Communist Party's prohibitions on bourgeois values. In the third wave, Irish writers express the frustrations of their cultural identity. Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes her protagonist back to Ireland to heal her psychic wounds. In England, Thatcherism had created a materialistic culture that eroded many feminists' socialist values. Fay Weldon's Big Woman satirizes the demise of second-wave idealism, asking where feminism can go from here.

This collection presents international research on the work of Irish women writers at the turn of the twentieth century. These essays make a key contribution to contemporary feminist recovery projects and remapping the landscape of Irish literature of this period.

Women’s Life Writing and Early Modern Ireland provides an original perspective on both new and familiar texts in this first critical collection to focus on seventeenth-century women’s life writing in a specifically Irish context. By shifting the focus away from England—even though many of these writers would have identified themselves as English—and making Ireland and Irishness the focus of their essays, the contributors resituate women’s narratives in a powerful and revealing landscape. This volume addresses a range of genres, from letters to book marginalia, and a number of different women, from now-canonical life writers such as Mary Rich and Ann Fanshawe to far less familiar figures such as Eliza Blennerhassett and the correspondents and supplicants of William King, archbishop of Dublin. The writings of the Boyle sisters and the Duchess of Ormonde—women from the two most important families in seventeenth-century Ireland—also receive a thorough analysis. These innovative and nuanced scholarly considerations of the powerful influence of Ireland on these writers’ construction of self, provide fresh, illuminating insights into both their writing and their broader cultural context.

Irish Women's Fiction examines women's novels up to and following the establishment of the Irish state, the period of the Second World War, the Second Wave feminism of the 1970s, to postmodernism in the 1990s. Heather Ingman discusses Irish women's writing across all major genres both literary and popular, including children's writing, crime fiction, and in the discussion of the writing of the Celtic Tiger era, the phenomenal success of Irish chick lit. The topic of Irish women's writing is still a neglected one, with women's novels too often sidelined, despite the international recognition gained by prize-winning novels by Anne Enright and Emma Donoghue among others. Describing the circumstances of women's writing lives, as well as the themes with which they deal, Irish Women's Fiction is written in an accessible style and is the first ever single-volume survey of Irish women's writing and writers, bringing Irish women writers back in to the canon of Irish literature.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the emergence, consolidation and development of the Irish women's movement, as a social movement, in the course of the twentieth century. It seek to address several lacunae in Irish studies by illuminating the processes through which the movement and, in particular, networks of constituent organisations, came to fruition as agencies of social change. The central argument advanced is that when viewed historically, the Irish women's movement is characterised by its interconnectedness and continuity: the central tensions, themes and organising strategies of the movement connects diverse organisations and constituencies, over time and space. This book will be essential reading for those interested in Irish studies, sociology, history, women's studies, and politics.

This book offers the first comprehensive survey of writing by women in Ireland from the seventeenth century to the present day. It covers literature in all genres, including poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as life-writing and unpublished writing, and addresses work in both English and Irish. The chapters are authored by leading experts in their field, giving readers an introduction to cutting edge research on each period and topic. Survey chapters give an essential historical overview, and are complemented by a focus on selected topics such as the short story, and key figures whose relationship to the narrative of Irish literary history is analysed and reconsidered. Demonstrating the pioneering achievements of a huge number of many hitherto neglected writers, A History of Modern Irish Women's Literature makes a critical intervention in Irish literary history.

The ranks of English women writers rose steeply in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, contributing to the era’s revolutionary social movements as well as to transforming literary genres in prose and poetry. The phenomena of ‘the new’ — ‘New Women’, ‘New Unionism’, ‘New Imperialism’, ‘New Ethics’, ‘New Critics’, ‘New Journalism’, ‘New Man’ — are this moment’s touchstones. This book tracks the period's new social phenomena and unfolds its distinctively modern modes of writing. It provides expert introductions amid new insights into women’s writing throughout the United Kingdom and around the globe.

Irish women writers entered the British and international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. Literary history is only now beginning to give them the attention they deserve for their contributions to the literary landscape of Ireland, which has included far more women writers, with far more diverse identities, than hitherto acknowledged. This collection of new essays by leading scholars explores how women writers including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, Ella Young and Beatrice Grimshaw used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. The chapters investigate their dialogue with a contemporary politics that included the topics of education, cosmopolitanism, language, empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, the marriage 'market', the publishing industry, readership(s), the commercial market and employment.