Irish women writers entered the British and international publishing scene in unprecedented numbers in the period between 1878 and 1922. Literary history is only now beginning to give them the attention they deserve for their contributions to the literary landscape of Ireland, which has included far more women writers, with far more diverse identities, than hitherto acknowledged.
This collection of essays by leading scholars explores how women writers including Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, Katharine Tynan, Lady Gregory, Rosa Mulholland, Ella Young and Beatrice Grimshaw used their work to advance their own private and public political concerns through astute manoeuvrings both in the expanding publishing industry and against the partisan expectations of an ever-growing readership. The chapters investigate their dialogue with a contemporary politics that included the topics of education, cosmopolitanism, language, empire, economics, philanthropy, socialism, and the marriage 'market'. List of figures List of contributors Foreword by Lia Mills Acknowledgements
Introduction - Anna Pilz and Whitney Standlee
1. Works, righteousness, philanthropy and the market in the novels of Charlotte Riddell - Patrick Maume
2. 'She's nothin' but a shadda': the politics of marriage in late Mulholland - James H. Murphy
3. Nature, education, and liberty in The Book of Gilly by Emily Lawless - Heidi Hansson
4. Girls with 'go': female homosociality in L. T. Meade's schoolgirl novels - Whitney Standlee
5. 'Breaking away': Beatrice Grimshaw and the commercial woman writer - Jane Mahony and Eve Patten
6. Women, ambition and the city, 1890-1910 - Ciaran O'Neill and Mai Yatani
7. 'An Irish problem': bilingual manoeuvres in the work of Somerville and Ross - Margaret Kelleher
8. 'A bad master': religion, Jacobitism and the politics of representation in Lady Gregory's The White Cockade - Anna Pilz