A Belfast Woman: Shame, Guilt, and Gender in Mary Beckett’s Short Stories of the 1950s

Abstract

Mary Beckett, who died in November 2013 at the age of eighty-seven, was, as writer Damian Smyth told the Belfast Telegraph upon her passing, “a new voice from an unexpected place.” Although Beckett’s later work is better known, she first emerged as a powerful female voice in Irish literature during the 1950s. During that decade, she wrote several radio plays for BBC Northern Ireland; she was featured as the lone woman in a symposium called “The Young Writer” in the Dublin literary magazine the Bell in 1951; she was included in a special “Women Writers Issue” of Irish Writing, alongside Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, and Kate O’Brien, in 1954; and she was given pride of place as author of the lead short story in the Belfast journal Threshold when it launched in 1957. By that time she had married and moved to Dublin, as her biography and byline for that issue indicated. After her second story for Threshold, “The Weaker Sex,” appeared in 1958, she would not publish again for twenty-two years until Sean McMahon, then an editor at Poolbeg Press, encouraged her to gather her previous stories and to write a new one that would become the title piece to her 1980 collection A Belfast Woman. At the time of that anthology’s publication, the marketing campaign for Beckett’s book promoted her as a mother of five children, and she was often interviewed and photographed in her kitchen, with her tile backsplash behind her and flowered curtains at the window, her white hair primly styled, her smile very much resembling stereotypical ideas of what a kind Irish grandmother should look like—although she was only fifty-four-years-old. In 1987, Beckett published her first novel, Give Them Stones, which is often read as a representative work about the “Troubles.” She wrote a second collection of stories, A Literary Woman