From Bushy Park to Elsinore: Noëlle Ffrench Davies
Mary Turley-McGrath In January 1924, a young Irish woman arrived in Denmark to take up her position as a lecturer in the International People’s College in Elsinore. Born into a wealthy farming background in Co. Roscommon, she could have opted for a leisurely life….
Research Pioneers 13: Kathryn Laing
Kathryn Laing has a career-long research expertise in women’s writing and Irish women’s writing in particular. Her wide-ranging publications focus on the works of Hannah Lynch, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, and Edna O’Brien. Together with Faith Binckes, she’s co-written the study Hannah Lynch, 1859-1904:…
Away with the Fairies: Irish Folklore and Fin-De-Siècle Motherhood in Katharine Tynan’s Ballads and Lyrics (1891)
Sadbh Kellett, University of St. Andrews The Irish writer Katharine Tynan was remarkable in her personal and literary embodiment of the ‘New Woman’. An educated member of Dublin’s Catholic middle-class, Tynan’s formidable literary career resulted in her financial independence, which she maintained alongside her…
Rockmahon, Blackrock Co. Cork: Family home of Novelist and Short Story writer Ethel Colburn Mayne (1865-1941)
Elke D’hoker, University of Leuven This is Rockmahon[i], one of the original nineteenth-century properties along Castle Road in Blackrock, Cork. Built around 1820, the house is adjacent to the river Lee. It faces north towards the docks and the Tivoli hills and east towards…
Chambers’s Journal and Irish Women Writers at the Fin de Siècle: The Case of Magdalen Rock
Alexis Easley, University of St. Thomas From its founding in 1832, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal strove to reach a national audience. This meant employing a corps of writers who could speak to both national and regional concerns. As David Masson noted in 1851, the Chambers…
Hope and Hunger in a Stricken Land: Jane Wilde and the Great Hunger
Christine Kinealy, Director of Ireland’s Great Hunger Institute at Quinnipiac University This is an extract from Professor Christine Kinealy’s article ‘Hope and Hunger in a Stricken Land: the Wilde Family and the Great Hunger’ in Reading Ireland, issue 12, edited by Adrienne Leavy. Speranza…
The Unravelling of Old Certainties: Elizabeth Bowen and the Search for Stability in Times of Flux
Orlaith Darling, Trinity College Dublin In the U.S. post-script to The Demon Lover and Other Stories (1945), Elizabeth Bowen expresses the human yearning for security-in-placement: The search for indestructible landmarks in a destructible world led many down strange paths […] The violent destruction of…
Memory, Landscape and Loss in Irish Emigrant Women’s Memoirs
Dr Sarah O’Brien, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick In October, a woman uploaded a photo to her social media account. Taken that morning, it showed her at the edge of a hospital bed, head held in her hands. Her body, partly exposed by a drooping towel, was doubled over in grief. She…
‘THE EXTINGUISHED CASTLE’: ELIZABETH BOWEN’S HAUNTED HOUSE IN ‘HER TABLE SPREAD’
Dr Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (Queen’s University Belfast) Elizabeth Bowen (7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) Elizabeth Bowen had a thing for haunted houses. They appear frequently in her oeuvre, and especially in her short stories. One such tale, the comically grotesque ‘Her Table…
Research Pioneers 12: Tina O’Toole
Tina O’Toole has been recognised as a leading scholar in Irish women’s studies since her first full-length published work, the Dictionary of Munster Women Writers, emerged in 2005 and added important names to the growing list of Irish women writers who had long been…
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