Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women

Women's writing has always been something of a postscript to the popular conception of Irish literature – a fact that was heavily underlined with the publication of the first three volumes of the Field Day anthologies of Irish literature in the early 1990s, from which the female voice was strikingly absent. Field Day followed up with a fourth volume dedicated to women's writing and edited by women, which for some critics seemed too little, too late. Ingman's text, then, is an important one: despite the criticism of Field Day and the rivers of ink that have been spilled internationally on Irish writing, there has still been relatively little said about Irish women's writing. Moreover, Ingman sets her survey apart from other works in the area, such as Ann Owens Weekes's Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition and Christine St. Peter's Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary Women's Fiction. She aims to draw on “recent ground-breaking work in Irish women's history” (1), chooses a larger number of texts to consider than Weekes, and, unlike St. Peter, she incorporates an “overarching thematic focus” (2) into her reading of the texts

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