Irish Women Writers | The Irish Times

Portraits of the artists as women

To mark International Women’s Day we’ve created an antidote to the all-male Irish Writers poster of bars and student bedrooms. Download your poster here

‘Jennifer Johnston’s fiction reminds us of the indeterminacy of the past, and the dangers of idealising any one version of Ireland’s recent history, or our own family history.’ Photograph: Dara Mac Donaill / The Irish Times

In praise of Jennifer Johnston

Adrienne Leavy

Irish Times Blook Club: Novelist has chronicled the family across a century of troubled Irish history

Maeve Brennan: Twinkling madness and the unsettling feeling of normality

In praise of Maeve Brennan, by Anne Enright

Anne Enright

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘The line between holding it together and falling apart is thinner here than anywhere else in Irish fiction’

Using a pen-name and reluctant to be interviewed, Biddy Jenkinson’s secrecy once prompted speculation that a committee wrote her poems. Photograph: Cyril Byrne/The Irish Times

In praise of Biddy Jenkinson, by Caitlín Nic Íomhair

Caitlín Nic Íomhair

The Irish language poet is famously private, but her work is anything but witholding, full of love and laughter, amazement and hope

“If writers are a Venn diagram of intimidating geniuses and warm-hearted crafters, Anne Haverty falls into the intersection, that lentil-shaped partial eclipse where the most readable writers reside.” Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

In praise of Anne Haverty by Manchán Magan

Manchán Magan

Irish women writers: ‘A skilled wordsmith capable of wielding an inked scalpel to delightful and dastardly effect’

Nuala Ní Chonchúir: “She is a modern feminist who embraces the Irish language and does more for its credibility than a dozen geansaí -wearing gaelgóirs. Unflinching as it is, her work is infused with empathy.”

In praise of Nuala Ní Chonchúir by Cathy Dillon

Cathy Dillon

Irish Women Writers: ‘Ní Chonchúir doesn’t shrink from tackling life’s pain, compromises and savagery, but her rich, original imagery captures its sensual delights also’

Iris Murdoch: If she had “a lifetime’s investment in Irishness”, in her biographer Peter Conradi’s shrewd words, she was an insider and an outsider at one and the same time, reflecting a Protestant ability “to slip in and out of Irishness”. Photograph: Getty Images

In praise of Iris Murdoch, by Ian d’Alton

Ian d’Alton

Irish Women Writers: one of the great writers in English, her relationship as a southern Protestant exile with the land of her birth, as explored in both her fiction and personal life, was conflicted but fascinating

The Women Writers’ Club members produced an argosy of books that would fill many anthologies and critical journals for decades to come; collectively, as a club, they relentlessly promoted women in the professions and celebrated a corpus of women’s writing that relayed the truth about women’s lives, experiences and sexuality

An Irish literary set that was more Bloomsbury than barstool

Dr Deirdre Brady

The Women Writers’ Club hung out in Robert’s Cafe and Jammet’s, not McDaid’s or the Palace Bar, but this radical group fostered a distinctive, modern and decidedly female literary canon

Medbh McGuckian: has taken Emily Dickinson’s famous dictum “Tell the truth but tell it slant” to heart, obliquely drawing attention to private female sexuality as a way to question the propriety of the political process, with her poems offering alternatives to both personal and national perspectives.

In praise of Medbh McGuckian, by Adrienne Leavy

Adrienne Leavy

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘she challenges stereotypical representations of femininity and interrogates nationalist tropes of Ireland as woman’

Eilís Dillon: “it would be a pity if today’s young readers did not have the opportunity to encounter the young sailors’ confrontation with the squall in The Santa Maria or the rescue of the kidnapped children in The Island of Ghosts or, most striking of all, the visceral force of the final awakening of the mighty stallion in The Island of Horses”

In praise of Eilís Dillon, by Robert Dunbar

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘she conveys a poetic, often elegiac, sense of place and portrays characters with richness and depth’

As a writer Mary Anne Sadlier was emphatically didactic. Her work provides examples of good conduct for Catholic Irish emigrants, to compel them to “retain their home-virtues and follow the teachings of religion in these great Babylons of the west”, as she wrote in a programmatic preface to Bessy Conway; or, The Irish Girl in America (1861)

In praise of Mary Anne Sadlier, a literary figurehead of Catholic North America

Marguérite Corporaal and Christopher Cusack

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘she gave voice to the preoccupations of a large section of the Irish-American community’

Author Mary O’Donnell at home in Maynooth, Co Kildare: “its successful melding of the spiritual and the aesthetic will continue to attract readers to O’Donnell’s work long after some of her commercially more successful contemporaries have faded into oblivion”. Photograph: Matt Kavanagh

In praise of Mary O’Donnell, by Eamon Maher

Eamon Maher

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Rather than constantly dealing with the same material and the same human dilemmas, she seeks out new horizons’

Nothing new under the sun: Mary Shine with her Irish Women Writers, which she produced with her friend Vincent Kinane in 1999. “I particularly remember, at that time, being very annoyed that no matter what bookshop or even coffee shop with a literary flavour I went into, all the posters, postcards and trappings about writers were of the same list of males.”

‘I loved your Irish women writers poster – here’s one I made earlier’

Mary Shine

Mary Shine had a pleasant surprise when she opened The Irish Times last Saturday. Our poster brought back happy memories of her own project, which she is delighted to share

Mary Costello with her Eason Novel of the Year for Academy Street at last year’s Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards.Photograph: Aidan Crawley

In praise of Mary Costello, by Ethel Rohan

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Skilled, observant and empathetic, Mary Costello chronicles the specific and telling details of everyday lives in pivotal circumstances, and captures human yearning at its most instructive and affecting’

Hollywood’s supernatural thriller The Uninvited (1944) was based on the book Uneasy Freehold (1941) by Dorothy Macardle, a prominent member of the Women Writers’ Club (1933-1958).

In praise of the Women Writers’ Club, by Deirdre Brady

Deirdre Brady

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘This pioneering coterie left behind a literary legacy that advocated education for women, freedom of expression and egalitarian values which still hold true today’

Mary Lavin: her stories evoke situations with sympathy and candour, and often with a frank and delicious comedy. Photograph: Paddy Whelan

In praise of Mary Lavin, by Belinda McKeon

Belinda McKeon

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She depicted with immense power the inner lives of women’

Caitríona O’Reilly: “wry humour is much in evidence throughout O’Reilly’s meticulous poetry, balancing what is frequently its devastating emotional freight”

In praise of Caitríona O’Reilly, by Neil Hegarty

Neil Hegarty

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘She understands the limitations of the self and the fragility of the world – but this awareness of temporality in its turn gives O’Reilly’s work its authority and its arresting, lyrical power’

Tana French: “The Secret Place, her latest, and arguably her best yet, is about a murder in an exclusive girls’ boarding school. Clear a day or two of pure uninterrupted reading time and enjoy.” Photograph: Frank Miller

In praise of Tana French, by Claire Coughlan

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘You never get the tired trope of the same weary detective with an ex-wife and a drink problem, common to many crime series. What you do get is crackling dialogue, and whip-smart observations on the Irish zeitgeist’

Christine Dwyer Hickey: “In its energy and sweep, her Dublin trilogy resembles the 19th-century novel, but Tatty establishes Dwyer Hickey firmly in the modernist tradition.” Photograph: Eric Luke

In praise of Christine Dwyer Hickey, by John Montague

John Montague

Irish Women Writers: ‘Novelist, short-story writer and playwright, as diverse and original a talent as one could hope to find’

Dervla Murphy in 1997: “our heroine tap tap taps out her notes from scraps of paper often scratched out in subzero/ sodden/ insect-riven conditions, transforming them into her astonishing books – observant, engaged, compassionate and unflinching”. Photograph: Jack Mcmanus

In praise of Dervla Murphy, by Rosita Sweetman

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Not only is Dervla (true desire in Gaelic) a wonderful writer, she goes out and does stuff – physically, often politically, wildly dangerous stuff, cycling and living for months on end in Gaza, Africa, Afghanistan, India, the Urals’

Jennifer Johnston: Betrayal, hatred and the first World War have been major themes in her work. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

In praise of Jennifer Johnston, by Eileen Battersby

Eileen Battersby

Celebrating Irish women writers: ‘Jennifer Johnston is canny; her laconic narrators reveal her sophisticated grasp of the many faces of Irishness’

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