These Traits Also Endure: Contemporary Irish and Irish-American Women Writers

Abstract

Where are the contemporary women novelists in Irish Studies? Why is no one writing about them? A cursory review of the top journals in the field suggests a decided lack of interest. Sampling six issues of Eire-Ireland from 1994 to 1999, totaling sixty essays, yielded only seven about women, none of them novelists. A review of seven issues of New Hibernia Review between 1998 and 2002 found four essays about women out of a possible sixty-one. Of these, only one focused on a novelist. This is not the editors' fault, for at conferences and symposia the primary focus continues to be male writers and historical figures. Nor did the nineteenth century prove more interesting than the twentieth. In Erin's Daugh ters in America (1983), Hasia Diner chronicles the nineteenth-century emigra tion of women from Ireland to the United States, and lanet Nolan continues the story in Ourselves, Alone (1990). But theirs is an historical view apparently unshared by literary critics. Daniel Casey and Robert Rhodes's edited collection Irish-American Fiction: Essays in Criticism (1979) features women in two out of ten chapters: one covers women's perspectives from Betty Smith to Mary McCarthy; the other critiques the work of Elizabeth Cullinan. Ten years later, their reader, Modern Irish-American Fiction (1989) devotes six of its twenty-two short stories to works by women: Betty Smith, Mary McCarthy, Mary Curran, Flannery O'Connor, Maureen Howard, Elizabeth Cullinan, and Mary Gordon.1 Not until Charles Fanning s survey of Irish-American fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s, The Irish Voice in America (1990), was there any extended, critical, contextualized discussion of contemporary Irish-American women writers.