Jane Barlow, George Egerton, Somerville and Ross, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Maeve Brennan, Edna OâBrien, and Mary Beckett: these are only some of many Irish women writers to have achieved widespread popularity and critical acclaim with their short fiction since the late nineteenth century. In the standard histories and theories of the Irish short story, however, their achievements have often been side-lined: limited to one or two small chapters, as in Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brownâs seminal The Irish Short Story (1979) and James Kilroyâs The Irish Short Story: A Critical History (1984) or ignored altogether as in Deborah Averillâs The Irish Short Story from George Moore to Frank OâConnor (1982). In these and other works, indeed, the history and conception of the Irish short story are constructed around such âmasters of the genreâ such as Carleton, Moore, Joyce, OâConnor, OâFlaherty and OâFaolĂĄin, and women writers are at best but a footnote to this history (Kiely 2011, 8). This is also the picture we find in the standard, often reprinted, anthologies of the Irish short story: Frank OâConnorâs Classic Irish Short Stories (1957), Vivian Mercierâs Great Irish Short Stories (1964), Benedict Kielyâs The Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories (1981) and William Trevorâs The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1991). In all of those, the number of short stories by women writers amounts to less than a fifth of the stories.
However, there are signs that this monochrome picture is changing. Thanks to the recovery work of feminist writers and critics, Irish womenâs short fiction has been promoted in such anthologies as Janet Madden-Simpsonâs A Womanâs Part: An Anthology of Short Fiction By and About Irish Women 1890â1960 (1984), Caroline Walshâs Virgins and Hyacinths (1993) and Territories of Voice: Contemporary Short Stories by Irish Women Writers (1991), edited by Louise DeSalvo, Kathleen Walsh DâArcy and Katherine Hogan. More recently, two fascinating anthologies have represented short stories by Irish women writers from the nineteenth century to the present: Cutting the Night in Two (2001), edited by Evelyn Conlon and Hans-Christian Oeser, and The Long Gaze Back (2015), edited by SinĂ©ad Gleeson. These anthologies have been of seminal importance both in creating an awareness of the long-standing involvement of Irish women writers with the genre of the short story, and in encouraging contemporary efforts in the form. Equally important have been the recovery attempts devoted to the work of individual writers. Over the past two decades, story collections by Mary Lavin and George Egerton have been brought back into print (Egerton 2006; Lavin 2011, 2012), while the short stories of Maeve Brennan and Elizabeth Bowen have been newly collected in several volumes (Brennan 1998, 2000; Bowen and Hepburn 2008). This in turn has produced new author studies about the short fiction of these writers and, hence, a better understanding of their work (Lassner 1991; Laing et al. 2006; Dâhoker 2013b). Finally, two recent publications, Heather Ingmanâs A History of the Irish Short Story (2009) and Anne Enrightâs The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story (2010), consider and include Irish women writers on a par with their male colleagues.
Yet, however valuable these works are, they have not yet been able to dislodge the narrow and normative conception of the Irish short story which has held sway since the middle of the twentieth century. Based on the work of a handful of canonical male writers, this conception is often alien to the short fiction of Irish women writers and, as I will argue, it has exacerbated their marginalization in many ways. It is important, therefore, not just to open up literary histories and anthologies to the short stories of women writers, but also to consider how their work challenges the norms and orthodoxies of the Irish short story itself. As Patricia Coughlan notes about Irish literature in general, âThere remains [âŠ] a need for persistent intervention in the canon to redress the occlusion, omission and marginalization of women writers by those male-focused metanarratives which still dominate perceptions of Irish literary traditionâ (2008, 1). Hence, the double aim of this book is to study the short fiction of Irish women writers and to see how their work challenges the established understanding of the Irish short story tradition.
For a general idea of this standard critical conception of the Irish short story, it suffices to peruse the Prefaces of the classic Irish short fiction anthologies just mentioned: by Mercier, Trevor, Kiely and OâConnor. In an attempt to explain the standing and success of the short story in Ireland, these editors often rehearse the same arguments: the Irish short story emerged out of a vibrant oral storytelling tradition and inherited its emphasis on plot and on voice (Mercier 1992, 8), the genre came natural to the Irish, given their âinstinctiveâ âflairâ for storytelling (Trevor 1991, ix, xv), and it could prosper because of the absence of a strong novel tradition (OâConnor 1957, ix). From these editorials and the stories they preface, the image emerges of the Irish short story as a traditional form, rooted in a common Gaelic heritage and general storytelling culture. It is a form that is shaped by Irish history and reality and comments on it, often from an off-centric, marginalized perspective. Indeed, protagonists of the Irish short story are often judged to be isolated or alienated from the community around them (Mercier 1992, 17). As a rule, Frank OâConnor is quoted in support of these statements. Indeed, the presiding image of the Irish short story is heavily indebted to OâConnorâs landmark study, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Because of the profound and prolonged influence of this book on the conceptualization of the Irish short story traditionâand its attendant marginalization of the work of women writersâit is instructive to take a closer look at OâConnorâs main theories.
Frank OâConnorâs Outsiders
In the Introduction to The Lonely Voice, OâConnor proposes three central concepts for the short storyââthe lonely voiceâ, âthe submerged population groupâ, and âthe outsiderââwhich he then elaborates in close readings of individual authors in the chapters that follow. With the âlonely voiceâ, OâConnor highlights the short storyâs embeddedness in, and difference from, an oral tradition: in the best stories we hear the voice of the individual writer who presses a storyâand a messageâon the individual reader. This idea favours well-crafted, realist stories over the work of âskilful stylistsâ who âso fashioned the short story that it no longer ran with the voice of man speakingâ (OâConnor 2004, 29). Moreover, the interaction between solitary writer and solitary reader is embedded within their shared belonging to what OâConnor calls âa submerged population groupâ (2004, 17). This oft-quoted term is first introduced to explain the prevalence of the short story among ex-centric societies or ethnic groups, who lack âthe classical concept of a stable societyâ required by the novel (2004, 20). Yet, OâConnor then shifts its meaning to define what he considers the essence of the short story, its focus on the experience of the outsider:
This emphasis on âlonelinessâ as âthe one subject a storyteller must write aboutâ thus merges with that of the submerged population group and with the title metaphor of the lonely voice into a compelling image of the short story as a realist form predicated on a romantic anti-hero, âremote from the communityâ and âalways dreaming of escapeâ (2004, 109, 20, 18).Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echoâChrist, Socrates, Moses [âŠ] As a result there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novelâan intense awareness of human loneliness. (2004, 18â19)
The idea that the short story most typically expresses the fate of the lonely outsider has been echoed by many subsequent critics of the short story, both to distinguish the short story from the novel and to explain the genreâs flourishing among marginalized groups, whether in terms of nationality, ethnicity or gender (Shaw 1983; May 1984; Harris 1994). As Clare Hanson puts it, quoting OâConnor:
In Irish literary criticism, as we have seen, OâConnorâs ideas have mostly been used to explain the success of the Irish short story in terms of the marginalized perspective of the Irish as a submerged population group and to normatively define this ânational genreâ as a realist form with oral roots, expressing an individualâs loneliness and alienation from society. In her critical history of the Irish short story, for instance, Deborah Averill traces in the short fiction of writers from Moore to OâConnor what she considers âone of the broadest and most pervasive themes in the Irish short story [âŠ] the conflict between the individual and the communityâ, arguing, âMost Irish writers regarded their society as peculiar, self-defeating and out-of-step with other Western societies, and they could not achieve the stable, universalised view of human life that the novel demandsâ (1982, 24). David Norris similarly considers the individualâs imaginative revolt against the authority structures of Church, State and Society as the theme âcommon to all significant writersâ of the Irish short story (1979, 39â40) and James Kilroy argues, âAmong the subjects treated in almost every short story is the individualâs relationship to societyââa relationship which is mostly one of alienation, disillusionment and despair (1984, 6).Is it not the case that the short story is or has been notably a form of the margins, a form which is in some sense ex-centric, not part of official or âhighâ cultural hegemony? [âŠ] The short story has offered itself to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacksâwriters who for one reason or another have not been part of the ruling narrative or epistemological/experiential framework of their society. (1989, 2)
Although Hanson draws on OâConnorâs terms to explain what she sees as a specific relation between women writers and the short story form, OâConnorâs arguments themselves reveal a male bias. His images of the short story writer (âthe lonely voice of a man speakingâ), protagonist (a Christ-like outsider, at odds with his community) and topic (loneliness and alienation) immediately call up men rather than women. Small wonder then that the two women writers he discusses in The Lonely Voice, Mary Lavin and Katherine Mansfield, fall short of the ideal he describes. Mary Lavinâs stories he considers un-Irish in their lack of political content and their focus on domestic issues. He discovers an âalmost Victorian attitude to love and marriageâ and a âdifferent set of valuesâ which, he argues, âmake her more of a novelist in her stories than OâFlaherty, OâFaolĂĄin, or Joyceâ (2004, 209, 211). Katherine Mansfield too is considered âsomething unusual in the history of the short storyâ and not in a positive sense: unlike âthe stories by real storytellersâ, her stories do not âleave a deep impressionâ: âI read and forget, read and forgetâ (2004, 125). OâConnorâs uneasy bafflement, in the case of Mary Lavin, and outright disapproval, in the case of Katherine Mansfield, reveal the male bias that underlies his ideal of the short story as a genre predicated on the experience of the lonely outsider, at odds with society and longing to escape. Inevitably, Lavinâs explorations of family relations in small Irish towns or Mansfieldâs dissection of love, relationships and feminine subjectivity are at odds with this ideal. The same can be said of Somerville and Rossâs humorous depiction of local traditions and events in an Anglo-Irish community, Val Mulkernsâs tracing of a tragic family history in her story sequence, Antiquities, and Maeve Brennanâs moving depictions of disintegrating marriages in The Rose Garden. While the neglect of these and many other women Irish writers in histories of the Irish short story is of course part of a larger marginalization of womenâs voices in literary history, it is certainly also due to the continued and unquestioned currency of OâConnorâs narrow and essentialist definitions within Irish short story criticism.
Beyond the Lonely Voice
With the renewed academic interest in Irish short fiction in recent years, there are signs that this hegemonic and normative view of the Irish short story is slowly being eroded. In her highly informative A History of the Irish Short Story, Heather Ingman questions âthe traditional affiliation of the Irish short story with the mimetic fiction of writers like Frank OâConnor and SĂ©an OâFaolĂĄinâ and highlights a central strand in Irish short fiction concerned with âplayfulness and subversionâ, with âexperimentation and modernityâ. She continues: âA longer historical overview allows us to assess the extent to which the formâs alliance with realism may be limited to a certain historical moment and reminds us that while realism in the short story might seem the norm, it is not the only mode in which the Irish short story operatesâ (2009, 12). Similarly, the Irish short storyâs association with questions of nationhood and national identityâas an expression of the different perspective of the Irish âsubmerged population groupââhas been criticized by Patrick Lonergan, who argues instead for a recognition of three important strands in Irish short fiction: a regional, a national and a cosmopolitan strand:
The development of Irish short fiction [in the period 1880â1921] could be considered from three interlinking perspectives. The works of Somerville and Ross and...