Caught in the Triple Net? Welsh, Scottish, and Irish Women Writers

Abstract

Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man famously declares: ‘When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.’1 Like Joyce himself, a number of the metropolitan, modernist women discussed elsewhere in this volume appeared to do just that; indeed, their flouting of rooted national identities was often at the heart of their self-conscious literary experimentation. Juxtaposed with such escapees are those others who chose to embrace nationality, language, and religion, not as nets to restrict but as ties to bind them to their countries, physically or imaginatively. Irish, Scottish, and Welsh women writers of this period are, arguably, particularly susceptible to making this choice, though their concern with nation and language, if not always with religion, does not necessarily entail the resistance to change which Joyce and his fictional creation were clearly seeking to avoid.