There are those who would deny that modernism has any place in the realist tradition of Irish women’s contemporary writing. Paige Reynolds is having none of it, and argues persuasively that there is a persistent strand of modernism throughout Irish women’s writing, one which complicates and promotes the adversarial stance of a stubborn mode of thinking.
During the height of modernism, she sees women’s experimental energies going into theatre and dance, only emerging later in fiction. And because women writers do not wish to be alienated from the mainstream, they readily adopt the realist mode for their prose. But framed within that realist structure are experimental modernist tropes that complicate the narrative. Even in a predominantly realist work such as Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Reynolds detects a low-key modernism at work in the act of close reading. Were its heroine more equipped with a modernist sensibility, Reynolds argues that Marianne would be capable of a greater degree of self-awareness than she displays.
[ I wanted to write a book about Irish women’s writing. They told me to include menOpens in new window ]
The range of writers covered is truly impressive. It runs from Kate O’Brien and Elizabeth Bowen to Rooney, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns. For Bowen, Reynolds chooses Summer Night, a short story published in 1941 and set in Ireland during the second World War. The section on Kate O’Brien is at the head of a chapter on praying, one of the modes of interiority the book examines (the others are reading and daydreaming). The O’Brien novel is The Land of Spices, set in a convent. Reynolds absolutely captures Kate O’Brien’s complex relationship to Catholicism: “her characters’ ambivalence about the efficacy of prayer frequently provided a register for her own conflicted relationship with religious faith and institutions”.
Joyce is the modernist whom the Irish women writers take on. Chief among them would be the late, great Edna O’Brien, who published a critical monograph on Joyce and the novella, Night, with its reworking of Molly Bloom’s reverie. The work of recent years that most stands out is Anna Burns’s Milkman. The novel is given a brilliant analysis in these pages, showing how the main character reads to keep surveillance at bay. I only wish there had been more of it. But that would be my complaint about almost everything here, and it’s a good one. Paige Reynolds’s book is consistently insightful into the many Irish women’s texts it treats and establishes itself at once as a major work in the field.
