“To better understanding” is the dedication Eithne (née O’Connell) Strong offers in her narrative poem Flesh the Greatest Sin (1980), viewed as a social document. Writing in both Irish and English, it is ironic that the work of this west Limerick poet has been misunderstood and has not received the native or wider dissemination it deserves. Understanding better is at the core of Strong’s work, where the psychological, the existential and quotidian dominate. She sought to unravel primal energies, but this is tempered by an archaic consciousness which did not fit easily into prevalent poetic genres.
I wonder whether Eithne’s solitary quest provoked certain prejudices, not only in the publishing world but more generally. After all, she was a rare woman writing about unholy themes and family issues before the women’s movement took off in Ireland. Perhaps there may have been a distorted perception of her as a person which did not facilitate her writerly ambition; and there may have been an element of unconscious self-sabotage.
In 1942 she married an English Protestant and became part of a radical psychoanalytic community with an unconventional lifestyle. I suggest that the sociopolitical, gendered and religious mores of those times had an impact on the literary reception of her work. It was only in the seventh decade of her life that she was accepted as a member of Aosdána – on her third attempt. Election depends on peer nomination.
[ The History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature: telling a bigger, truer storyOpens in new window ]
The outcome of this fiscal constraint was to restrict Strong’s ability to develop her craft because of the need to earn her living. Her compromised bardic status was reinforced by a wider lack of acknowledgment of her role in the development of Irish women’s writing generally. I believe this had the effect of diminishing the value of her work in the public eye and led to her being omitted from important anthologies, and to the absence of a book-length critique of her life, writings and contribution to the Irish literary world.
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Strong represented Irish writing through readings and symposiums in Germany, Finland, Denmark, England, Canada and the USA. She was a member of the executive committee of the Irish Writer’s Union; she participated in teaching, publishing, freelance journalism and running creative writing courses.
In Sarah In Passing (1974) her voice is strident, addressing the travails of being circumscribed by nine children
Despite appreciation and support from people such as John Deane of Poetry Ireland; Theo Dorgan, who helped the spread of poetry in the 1980s, and Jessie Lendennie of Salmon Poetry, who published Strong’s first retrospective collection: Spatial Nosing (1993), Eithne felt she had not received a just recognition, though there is a room dedicated to her at the Writer’s Centre in Parnell Square.
Eithne attempted to make meaning out of her life through her writing. Her first collection, Songs of Living (1961), is simultaneously lyrical, subversive and introspective. It was published by The Runa Press which she and her husband, psychoanalyst Rupert Strong, had established in 1942, producing a number of beautiful chapbooks drawing on the creative and often troubled people who gathered around their group.
In Sarah, in Passing (1974) her voice is strident, addressing the travails of being circumscribed by nine children. It anticipates issues of women’s rights and the ethics of feminism, which were still tentative in Ireland. This is significant because of Strong’s unacknowledged pioneering role in the development of Irish women’s writing and her hope that, in time, her place in the transition of English written by women in Ireland from the ‘40s onwards would be acknowledged.
Did her youthful choices conspire to marginalise her and to exile her original language? Her original poems were written and published in Irish before she met her husband, and appeared in An Glór and Comhar when she was 19 and a member of Craobh an Dócas. Yet, it seems that it was not possible for her to integrate Irish with the predominantly English, patriarchal environment in which she found herself in Monkstown from the 1940s onwards. Before reading to the American Conference for Irish Studies in New York (1994) and shortly thereafter addressing Conradh na Gaeilge in Washington, she was reported as saying: “I’ll be far from subversive in Washington. I’ll be rejoicing. If I hadn’t married an Englishman, I might have gone quite a different route.”
[ A prosaic lack of women in the Cambridge Companion to Irish PoetsOpens in new window ]
Eithne relinquished Irish for a long time but returned to it through her professor, Brendan Kennelly, at TCD, where she graduated in 1973 with fellow student Declan Kiberd. She taught Irish full-time at a college in Ballsbridge from her 50s until her retirement at 67; she cared for a son with an intellectual disability who lived with her until her death in 1999. She wrote all her adult life and re-embraced Irish literally and viscerally in the 1990s through the publication of four volumes by Coiscéim.
In Beleaguered But Determined: Irish Women Writers in Irish (1995), Mary N Harris states there have been “until recently few attempts on the part of women to express the reality of women’s lives through Irish”. In Nobel (1998), Strong takes that place through a homage to her Gaeltacht lineage. She claims nature as a witness to sorrow linking her to the tradition of the “Bean Caointe”.
Washing Soot off Stained Glass: An Exhibition of Poetry and Artwork with Eithne Strong and Sarah Strong will be held in the autumn in the Illuminations Gallery at Maynooth University, in tandem with a forthcoming event in the Museum of Literature Ireland
