Irish Women Writers and Their (Trans)National Networks: Making and Translating Local Colour Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT Irish women’s local colour fiction should be analysed in relation to three levels of literary brokerage: dedication, reviewing, and translation. This becomes clear from the case studies of Jane Barlow and Katharine Tynan, who moved in the same literary circles, a network of Irish authors during the 1880s and 1890s who recorded regional ways of life in their fiction and poetry. What has remained underexplored is how these two women – by referencing each other’s writings and by dedicating their work to each other and other women writers – actively helped to shape the parameters of an Irish version of local colour literature on both sides of the Atlantic. This study will address how local colour literature developed through networks between Irish women writers, and especially through the ways in which they reviewed each other’s work. Additionally, this article makes a case for an extension of our perception of female literary networks in terms of transnational distribution. It looks at translators, an often neglected group of female literary agents at the time, who in the case of Irish regional literature played a pivotal role in disseminating these women writers’ works outside Ireland.