Review
New Contexts: Re-framing 19th Century Irish Women’s Prose(CUP)
Other Voices
A welcome resurrection of some lesser-known Irish women writers, says Sean McMahon.
The excellent Cork University Press that published Heidi Hansson’s study of Emily Lawless last year now brings us a colloquy, edited by the same academic, on 19th century women writers considerably less well known. Some may have heard of ME Francis and everyone - thanks to Peter Bowles - will have heard of Somerville and Ross but the rest are feminae incognitae.
Irrepressible male chauvinism might suggest that an equal number of neglected male Irish writers could have been mined, suggesting an over-evaluation simply because of gender. Yet the reappraisal, not to say resurrection, of such writers as Selina Bunbury (did she give Wilde the excuse?), Elizabeth Hamilton, Fannie Gallaher and ‘Mrs Hungerford’, whose novel Molly Bawn (1878) seems to have combined light humorous romance with subtle emphasis on women’s rights, calls for accessibility.
The account of the fox symbolism in In Mr Knox’s Country (1915) among other considerations brushes in a suggestion of a rare deviation in the mindset of the Irish cousins in the matter of politics, with Violet Martin (of the once Catholic Galway family) remaining a staunch Unionist and the Anglo-Irish centaur happily accepting the Treaty.
