Books in brief: A ‘Proper’ Woman?; Finnegans Wake, Ulster and Partition; and Tearing Stripes off Zebras

A ‘Proper’ Woman? One Woman’s Story of Success and Failure in Academia

By Pat O’Connor

Peter Lang, £25

This is the memoir of a woman with a 46-year career in academia in Ireland and the UK, moving from contract research assistant to full professor of sociology (first woman in Ireland) and faculty dean. It opens with a summary of her personal background. Her first employment as a research-assistant at the ESRI led to a clash with the newly appointed head (whose ideas about a woman’s place were typical of the time) and thus began a process that repeated itself again and again as she struggled to make her way in male-dominated academia. She displayed intelligence, courage, determination – and even awkwardness, when necessary – and made extraordinary, ground-breaking progress. Personal anecdotes, combined with self-deprecating, penetrating and sometimes mordant humour, enliven this superbly told, absorbing story.

Finnegans Wake, Ulster and Partition

By Donal Manning

Cork University Press, €49

Bemoaning how scholars of Joyce’s interrogation of Irish history have focused on his attitudes to nationalism, virtually excluding unionism, Donal Manning finds extensive allusions to Ulster in Finnegans Wake and proposes to annotate and analyse them. He finds Joyce consistently represents partition negatively; this doesn’t just reflect his nationalist sympathies but also his deprecation of the common tendency to demonise outsiders and of ethnic, religious and political exclusivity – two of Joyce’s great themes in Finnegans Wake. His mythical, historical and topographic allusions to Ulster (it’s of Ireland and separate) serve to highlight such additional themes as that violence, whether British or Irish, is essentially the same and futile, and that such violence shouldn’t be glorified. Not always easy to follow and strained at times, but nonetheless fascinating for that.

Tearing Stripes off Zebras

Edited by Nessa O’Mahony

Arlen House, €20

This is an anthology of new writing by 33 women who have participated in the Women’s Education Bureau writing group, founded in 1987, and comprises poetry, prose and drama. The writing is of a high calibre, such as a short story featuring an elderly mother about to enter a retirement home who goes to New York instead, and another about the effects of dementia on a close female relationship; poems such as I Had Red Shoes Once, skilfully amusing on the bombing of a shoe shop “by those who loved / Ireland but not Pollocks Shoe Shop”, and Voices from an Invasion (1956), capturing tragic aspects of the Hungarian uprising; intriguing extracts from novels, and an informative, familial insight into women in business in 19th-century Ireland.