An Irishwoman in China

Abstract

In 1916, Emily de Burgh Daly, a Protestant from Roscommon, published An Irishwoman in China, an account of her twenty-four years as an expatriate. Daly sets out to provide a ‘simple record’ of expatriate life, and that account conforms at first to our expectations of travel writing as a narrative presentation of difference—of foreign others and exotic landscapes. However, in Daly's case, the narrative evolves to include complex and conflicted accounts of political upheaval and foreign intervention in Manchuria. In these episodes, in spite of her enthusiastic adherence to the British Empire, Daly begins to interrogate the presence of Western powers in China and to sympathise with Chinese resistance to foreign rule. Periodic visits to Ireland, on the other hand, occasion the consolidation of imperial identity. We find that, in Emily Daly's case, geographic distance and racial alterity create opportunities to renegotiate the boundaries of imperial self and Other. On home soil, however, those boundaries are reinstated and the interrogation of empire articulated abroad never translates into a critique of British rule in Ireland.