In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Recovering Their Voices: Irish Women Novelists in Britain
  • Janis Dawson
Whitney Standlee. “Power to Observe”: Irish Women Novelists in Britain, 1890–1916. Bern: Peter Lang, 2015. x + 278 pp. $65.95

IN AN ESSAY on Irish nationality published in 1912, Irish author and bibliographer Stephen Brown asserted that the Irish writer living in England was “best placed to view and convey the political differences between the two nations.” According to Brown, “anyone who has [End Page 543] power to observe, and who has lived in both countries in more or less intimate relations with their peoples knows that a deep gulf … separates the two” (“The Question of Irish Nationality,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 1.4 [1912], 645; quoted in“Power to Observe”). “Power to Observe,” Whitney Standlee’s study of six Irish women novelists, tests the hypothesis that writers “exiled to Britain enacted ‘a power to observe’ the political situation—gendered, national and cultural— in and between their native and adoptive homelands.” It explores the complex relationships between culture, politics, and gender in the lives and works of Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, George Egerton, Katherine Thurston, M. E. Francis, and Katharine Tynan. These writers represent a “cross-section” of prominent Catholic and Protestant writers from the landed and middle classes who spent most of their formative years in Ireland, but lived and published in England during a critical period in Anglo-Irish political relations. Although they were prolific and critically acclaimed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, like so many popular women writers of their day, their names were little known and their works largely forgotten by the middle of the twentieth century.

“Power to Observe” participates in discussions about Irish women’s contributions to literature and culture initiated more than two decades ago by scholars such as Ann Owens Weekes (Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, 1990) and Margaret MacCurtain (MacCurtain et al., “An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500–1900,” Irish Historical Studies, 28.109 [1992], 1–37). Standlee builds on numerous critical studies, including the controversial Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volumes IV and V: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (Angela Bourke et. al., eds. [2002]), Mary Pierce’s five-volume Irish Feminisms: 1810–1930 (2010), and Tina O’Toole’s The Irish New Woman (2013). “Power to Observe” is an important contribution to “the ongoing project of filling the critical gaps” identified by these studies.

Recalling the efforts of Elaine Showalter and the new feminist critics in the 1960s and 1970s to recover the reputations of “unjustly forgotten” nineteenth and early twentieth-century American and British women writers, Standlee argues that Irish women’s writing of the same period has not received the same critical attention. This critical neglect is due in part to a “tendency to define these women as natives of the nation in which they lived rather than the nation from which they emerged.” Many Irish women writers who conducted their careers in England, particularly before the founding of the Irish Free State in [End Page 544] 1922, have been identified as “British” even where there is ample evidence that they self-identified as Irish. Egerton, one of the first women writers to be singled out for “comment and commendation” by feminist critics, is seldom identified as Irish, while popular girls’ author and editor L. T. Meade is regularly identified as a British writer even though she frequently discussed her Irish girlhood in her celebrity interviews and introduced the “wild Irish girl” to legions of devoted girl readers. Irishness appears to be little more than an interesting footnote in discussions of their work. Standlee’s study focuses on reclaiming Irish identities as well as recovering literary reputations.

Although these writers won recognition outside Ireland, their achievements were not always acknowledged or well received in their native country. Meade, for example, was ranked a “literary celebrity” and “the most industrious writer of modern fiction” by the influential London magazine the Strand (1898), but as Standlee states: “the Irish press and public appear to have viewed her work largely with an admixture of distrust and indifference … neither she nor any of her numerous novels [close to 300] were...

pdf

Share