“Colleen Modernism”: Modernism’s Afterlife in Irish Women’s Writing

Abstract

S    twentieth-century Irish women’s writing can make use of a rich body of single author monographs, intellectual biographies, and insightful critical articles as well as the wealth of material provided in volumes  and  of The Field Day Anthology of IrishWriting. A number of these studies address the biographical links between twentieth-century Irish women writers and influential modernists, informing readers, for instance, that Maud Gonne encountered the Futurist Valentine de St. Point in Paris, or that Mary Colum hobnobbed with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, and Elinor Wylie in America. But few address in any sustained way how these writers engaged with modernist imperatives. In recent years, Elizabeth Bowen has been situated convincingly among the pantheon of modernists.1 However, with a few notable exceptions, experimental Irish women writers like Brigid