Rosa Mulholland republished on the centenary of her death

James H. Murphy Rosa Mulholland, Lady Gilbert (1841-1921), died in the spring of 1921. Spring 2021, the centenary of her death, marks the publication of Rosa Mulholland: Feminist, Victorian, Catholic and Patriot, published by Edward Everett Root and edited by James H. Murphy. This reader…

Research Pioneers 9: Elke D’hoker

In 2011, Elke D’hoker co-edited a ground-breaking collection of essays entitled Irish Women Writers: New Critical Perspectives (Peter Lang). Seminal in the field, this work helped to shape the critical framework of Irish women’s writing and acted to lead the way for future researchers….

Research Pioneers 8: David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase

David Clare, Fiona McDonagh and Justine Nakase are in the final stages of a project that promises to be a milestone in scholarship on women’s contribution to Irish theatre. They are co-editing the weighty two-volume collection The Golden Thread: Irish Women Playwrights (1716-2016), forthcoming…

Research Pioneers 5: Lucy Collins

Lucy Collins’ Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870-1970, published by Liverpool University Press in 2012, has made a crucial intervention in the field of Irish women’s literary history. As one reviewer described it, it reveals ‘a hitherto hidden history of poetry’…

Research Pioneers 4: Heidi Hansson

Heidi Hansson’s edited collection New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Writing (2007) has been praised by reviewers for its call for the field of literary studies to be augmented and for ‘addressing women’s literature as a “distinct tradition”’. Together with her monograph Emily Lawless…

Between Two Worlds: Examining “Merry England” as an Outlet for Irish Women Writers

Mary McCartney, University of St. Thomas In 1885, Katharine Tynan sent a letter to Alice Meynell thanking her for reviewing Tynan’s book Louise de la Vallière and Other Poems in the monthly periodical Merry England (1883–1895). Tynan writes, “It is a beautiful review, and…

Research Pioneers 3: James H. Murphy

From the period of his earliest publications, James H. Murphy has been involved in the process of recovering and re-examining largely forgotten Irish works. As one reviewer noted of his Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922 (1997), Murphy’s work is consistently the…

Research Pioneers 2: Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir

2018 saw the landmark publication of Heather Ingman and Clíona Ó Gallchoir’s A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature. Featuring 22 chapters that address women’s writing from the early modern period to the present, the volume makes a rich intervention not only in Irish…

Truth or Dare: Martina Devlin shares the introduction of her new book

Leaders. Rebels. Pioneers. Short stories about some of Ireland’s trailblazing women by award-winning writer Martina Devlin. In this collection we encounter Countess Markievicz back from the dead to cast a disapproving eye over modern Ireland, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington on hunger strike in jail, and Somerville and Ross discussing book…