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…
Research Pioneers 11: Julie Anne Stevens
Julie Anne Stevens is the leading expert in Irish literary studies on the works of the cousins Edith Somerville and Martin Ross. With two monographs on these collaborators – The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross (2007) and Two Irish Girls in Bohemia: The…
A Case for Editorial and Curatorial Interventions
Anna Pilz & Whitney Standlee, Network Team In the papers of Katharine Tynan Hinkson held at the John Rylands Library in Manchester is a strongly worded letter from 1902 that attests to the difficulties that tend to assail the editors of volumes of literature….
Research Pioneers 10: Mary S. Pierse
Mary S. Pierse edited, in 2010, the pioneering Irish Feminisms, 1810-1930 (Routledge). In these five volumes, she brought together 180 documents from a variety of genres that invite enticing and creative connections between historical documents, periodical press contributions, and literary texts. ‘The scale of…
From the archives: Annie M.P. Smithson Correspondence with Edmund Downey
Kathleen Williams, Network Team In 2016 staff at the John J. Burns Library at Boston College had opportunity to review a large collection of materials related to Irish women during the revolutionary period in Ireland that had been assembled by collector Loretta Clarke Murray. …
Network Publication: Irish Women Writers at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Alternative Histories, New Narratives
Edited by Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney Introduction: “A Palpable Energy” Kathryn Laing and Sinéad Mooney Silenced female voices, the gendered gaps and absences in archives and literary histories, and silence as theme and technique, all feature in many of the essays included in…
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