- New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose
In New Contexts: Re-Framing Nineteenth-Century Irish Women’s Prose, eight essays, preceded by an incisive introduction, depart from the position that the works—some of which have gathered only the slightest critical attention previously—are not to be assessed in the same way that we might consider canonical works written by men. She posits a different context in which to consider this body of often little-known work.
Over the past century, the critical tradition (such as it is) that has developed around this body of literature reflects an aesthetic underpinned by male ideology, which, Hansson contends unconsciously fosters, even as it is fostered by, a nationalist agenda. The resulting essentialist context leaves no room, in the formation of Irish identity, for the more politically ambiguous narratives of domestic and sentimental fiction written by obscure women. Hansson chronicles the disappearance of female presence in the canon through an analysis of public literary “noise.” Such noise, she argues, eventually extinguishes the more private, personal voices of women sequestered both physically and intellectually from the centers of cultural formation. At the same time, women developed what Hansson calls “double voice,” an ambivalent, often subversive response to the tension stemming from conflicting worlds they knew well: the private versus the public; personal versus political; Irish versus Anglo-Irish, and, of course, also versus English.
Hansson must confront the ambiguity of Irish identity, and she quickly refutes the canonical essentialism of nationalism. The contributing essayists reject Irish identification with birthplace or subject matter. They prefer to be inclusive. The “double voice” admits Irish-born writers, but also those who influenced Ireland. Jacqueline Belanger discusses The Cottagers of Glenburni [End Page 148] (1808), a popular Scottish novel by the Belfast native Elizabeth Hamilton. Although Hamilton considered herself as much Irish as she was Scottish, her writing attaches itself more closely to genre—didactic social reform—than to nationality. Most of her readers, whether Irish, Scottish, or English, agreed with her values. One admirer, Maria Edgeworth, praised the instructional narrative, common at the time, which served several perceived needs: a guide for lower classes to conform to standards of cleanliness, education, and industriousness. Belanger also considers Hamilton’s reformist role as a reaction against the romantic nationalism of Sydney Owenson’s work. She proposes an intriguing approach in discussing the “spy” language borrowed by the reformers to sneak their agenda, through the novels, into the lower classes’ mentality. Edgeworth, when writing Hamilton’s obituary, remarked on how Irish readers took to the story because it gave them a sense of superiority over the Scottish, whose slovenly habits—not theirs—were the supposed target.
Rianna O’Dwyer brings to life Lady Blessington, who raised herself from a local village society to a celebrity and London hostess who churned out sketches, travel logs, annuals, and novels to support herself. Surrounded by the literati of the 1830s, she competed vociferously with Lady Morgan for patrons of their individual salons and claimed to have instructed Lord Byron. One of her novels, Grace Cassidy, or The Repealers (1833), a roman à clef for which she published a key that same year, was set in Ireland, but nonetheless grounded itself in the activities of the English upper classes, reflecting their manners and values. O’Dwyer argues convincingly that Blessington, at worst a writer of pulp fiction and at best an uneven novelist, is a voice in this group that nonetheless warrants attention. Maria Lindgren Leavenworth writes about Selina Benbury, who published much travel writing in the 1840s. Although born in Ireland, Benbury considered herself English, always turning to England as her point of debarkation and return. In the few references to Ireland, the author’s remarks nearly always are negative and attempt to further distance its people and land from the more refined England.
Margaret Kelleher fast forwards to the 1880s Land League novels. These novelists complicated their domestic, often sentimental, novels with authorial political comments. Kelleher points out how...