Writing the Aran Islands: The Curious Case of Nurse B. N. Hedderman

Theo Joy Campbell District Nurse B. N. Hedderman’s 1917 memoir, Glimpses of my Life in Aran, was a puzzle I needed to solve.[i] I first stumbled upon it while researching J. M. Synge and his famous 1903 travelogue The Aran Islands. After reading Glimpses,…

Women Writers of the Catholic Literary Revival in England and Ireland: An Argument for Revaluation

Julia Meszaros The large-scale socio-cultural and political shifts of the late nineteenth century are reflected in the era’s vibrant literary culture. In Britain and Ireland, the years between 1860 and 1960 saw a particularly dynamic literary resurgence among Catholic writers. Catholic emancipation, marked by…

WINIFRED M. LETTS (1882-1972): The Writer I Knew

Bairbre O’Hogan My interest in the poet, novelist, dramatist and superb children’s writer, Winifred M. Letts, is more of a personal interest than an academic one. I would like her to be rediscovered for herself – not just to claim a stake in literary…

With Hannah Lynch in Tinos

Iliana Theodoropoulou “here is at last forgetfulness of sorrow and unrest”[1] Hannah Lynch visited Greece twice in her relatively short life. Her Greek island was Tinos. Her first journey there was a long stay of two years, from September (probably) 1885 to September 1887. …

Emerging Voices 6: Éadaoin Regan

Éadaoin Regan is currently in the final year of her PhD in the School of English and Digital Humanities, University College Cork. Her thesis, A method to the madness?: Representations of psychological disorder in Irish women’s fiction 1870-1914, employs feminist psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory…

Daisy Bates: ‘’Saviour of the Aborigines’

Ann Moroney The Irish writer Daisy Bates (1859- 1951), successful and infamous in equal measure in her time, left a journalistic legacy that remains virtually unknown today. Born in Tipperary in 1859 but residing for the majority of her life in the Australian outback,…

Emerging Voices 5: Maria Mulvany

Maria Mulvany is an early career researcher funded by an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship. Based at University College Dublin (UCD), Mulvany’s project “Ghostly Fictions: Haunting, Trauma and Time in Contemporary Irish Historical Fiction” engages with recent literary, queer and psychoanalytic theories of spectrality…

With Hannah Lynch and the Ursulines in Tinos- A Story of Remarkable Women

Iliana Theodoropoulou ‘I enjoy perfect freedom’. [1] In 1885 Irish writer Hannah Lynch (1859-1904) set out on travels through Greece that would continue over a period of two years. She began this journey by spending more than half a year as a guest at…

Recovering the Local-colour Stories of London-Irish Writer and Columnist Erminda Rentoul Esler

Giulia Bruna Donegal native Erminda Rentoul Esler (1860-1924) was a novelist, short-story writer, and journalist who lived and worked in London from 1889. Notably, W. B. Yeats included her in his 1895 articles on Irish National Literature for The Bookman and there referred to…

Remembering Eavan Boland – Open Letter

This is a copy of an open letter addressed to Professor Linda Doyle, Provost of Trinity College Dublin on the subject of memorialising the poet Eavan Boland (1944-2020) from the RASCAL website. The letter and it’s list of signatories (as of December 16th, 2021)…