There are those who deny that modernism has any place in the realist tradition of contemporary Irish women writers. Paige Reynolds will have none of this, and argues convincingly that there is a consistent strand of modernism throughout Irish women’s literature, which complicates and encourages the hostile attitude of a hardline mindset.
At the height of modernism, she sees women’s experimental energy flowing into theater and dance, only later emerging in fiction. And because women writers do not want to alienate themselves from the mainstream, they readily adopt the realist style for their prose. But embedded in this realist structure are experimental modernist tropes that complicate the narrative. Even in a predominantly realist work like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, Reynolds detects a subtle modernism at work upon close reading. Were the novel’s heroine endowed with more modernist sensibilities, Reynolds argues, Marianne would be capable of a greater degree of self-awareness than she displays.
( I wanted to write a book about Irish women. They told me to include men tooOpens in new window. )
The range of authors covered is truly impressive, 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 comes at the beginning of a chapter on prayer, one of the forms of interiority the book explores (the others are reading and daydreaming). The O’Brien novel is called The Land of Spices and is set in a monastery. Reynolds captures Kate O’Brien’s complex relationship with Catholicism perfectly: “Her characters’ ambivalence about the efficacy of prayer often provided an indication of their own conflicted relationship with religious belief and institutions.”
( My first encounter with Edna O’ Brien never left me, but the last one was the most difficultOpens in new window. )
Joyce is the modernist to whom Irish women writers turn. The most significant of these is the late, great Edna O’Brien, who published a critical monograph on Joyce and the novella Night with her reworking of Molly Bloom’s reveries. The work of recent years that stands out most is Anna Burns’s Milkman. The novel is brilliantly analyzed in these pages, showing how the main character reads to escape surveillance. 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’ book is consistently insightful about the many texts by Irish women it covers, and immediately establishes itself as a major work in the field.
