Bringing Irish short stories by women into the spotlight

They have often been overlooked in anthologies, but there is a long and thriving tradition from Maria Edgeworth to Eimear McBride

Richard Ford calls the short story the “high wire act of literature”, but my favourite description comes from Irish writer Mary Lavin, who described it as an “arrow in flight”. The phrase captures the brevity and epiphany of the form and some of the best practitioners – from Chekhov to Lorrie Moore, Katherine Mansfield to Kevin Barry – have fired it into unfamiliar places, soaring over a multitude of themes and ideas. Some are led by characters, others play with language or tone (who can forget the bone chill after reading Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery?), but all manage to distill something terrifying or tender or utterly distinct in just a couple of thousand words.

In the late 1990s, while studying English at university, I took a course on the Irish short story. The prescribed text, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, edited by William Trevor, contained early Gaelic folk tales and 39 short stories. We had another mandatory course on literary theory and – hurrah! – an introduction to feminism. Through a burgeoning exposure to Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, I noticed that only seven of the 39 stories were by women. A scan of the library shelves revealed that Trevor’s anthology wasn’t the worst offender when it came to gender imbalance. Almost every collection was edited by a man, and each book I opened – including anthologies from all around the world – was heavily weighted towards male writers. Irish offerings were no different: pick up an anthology of Irish short stories published between 1950 and 1990, and a familiar pattern emerges. Many anthologies had no women, others had just two or three female writers, and invariably these were the brilliant troika (before that word meant something else in contemporary Ireland) of Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien and Elizabeth Bowen. In The Lonely Voice, his 1962 study of the short story, Frank O’Connor wrote that the form’s “submerged population groups” were silenced and marginalised. Looking at the lack of women represented in anthologies over the decades, women could have been included as just such a fringe group.

Continue reading...