As preparation for this study, the author sought out and read some 200 novels and short-story collections from the past three decades of Irish women's writing. An achievement in itself, this also highlights a hidden history in the book, that of the independent and specialist Irish presses - Salmon, Poolbeg, Wolfhound, New Island, Attic - responsible for bringing so many women into print. The bibliography is a tribute to them and to the tenacity of Christine St Peter, whose accumulation of sources amounts to a rich archaeology of Irish women's fiction over the past generation; a literary evolution which has been, she claims, an important agent of Irish social change.
The result is a perceptive and well-written commentary, but one which inevitably struggles under the weight of its own agenda. For a start, the heterogeneity of those 200 or so texts is almost overwhelming in a study which aims at thematic coherence. St Peter's instinct is to categorise generically: we have "self-begetting" novels, incest narratives, blockbusters, feminist novels, and an almost surgical typology of the fiction of exile. Sometimes, this provides illuminating juxtapositions. Claire O'Connor's Belonging, for example, is considerably enriched when read alongside Jennifer Johnston's The Christmas Tree as a meta-fiction of the writing process.
An excellent chapter on historical fiction which situates Julia O'Faolain, Mary Leland and Aisling Foster within a heuristic process of "destabilising authorities" is original and pertinent in the context of cultural revisionism. But there are less happy alliances too. The pairing of Maeve Binchy with Patricia Scanlan is awkward, the former engaged as a stick to beat the latter in a rather po-faced analysis of popular romance, while the discussion of Northern Irish writers scrapes by on a dearth of material towards the uneasy conclusion that their predominant focus on Catholic working-class women exacts "a particular version of social justice", a reading which does little for cross-community parity of esteem.
More worrying, though, is the reductionism of such methods, and the diminishment of those who have, in effect, broken from the pack. Anne Enright's The Wig My Father Wore is cited in reference to fictions of exile, but her groundbreaking contribution as a formal stylist is ignored. Deirdre Madden's subtle explorations of the aesthetic are similarly eclipsed by her recruitment to the Troubles-writer coterie. This tendency to override individual distinction in favour of (supposed) group interest is perhaps a necessary evil of any survey, but it merges with a discernible political belatedness in the treatment of the past decade. St Peter's celebratory references to Irish women "finding a voice" in the face of "cultural prohibition" surely underestimates recent advances (in both senses, for the postAntonia Logue generation) in Irish writing and publishing.
In her chapter, "Authorship, the Forbidden Country", she presses for a female literary culture in Ireland which will challenge patriarchal institutions - the misogynist publishing houses, the exclusive anthologies and the biased review pages of certain Irish newspapers (i.e., this one). But are these issues still as current as she suggests? Perhaps only a creative writer is qualified to answer: from a critical perspective the evangelism suggests a significant time-lag between the book's inspiration and publication.
Despite these criticisms, St Peter has produced a scholarly and useful study, a much-needed update to Ann Owens Weeke's Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (1990). She also fleshes out trajectories launched by Gerry Smyth's The Novel and the Nation (1997), which hesitantly, but I think, rightly drew women writers into an Irish mainstream. Most importantly, this book will provide a spring-board for students who want to pursue material in this field, a factor which does credit to its author's accessible and generous critical style.
Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College, Dublin.