Nation, Gender, and Genre

This chapter examines the changing perception of nineteenth-century Irish women’s fiction and the influence of this body of fiction on emergent modernism and cultural nationalism. The relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Irish fiction was consistently obscured by the agendas of the Irish Revival and cultural nationalism during the twentieth century. This is particularly true of the work of women writers, who frequently suffered a double erasure from the literary record on the basis of gender. This chapter builds on the recovery project of feminist criticism to examine the depth and strength of these writers’ legacy. The analysis includes late nineteenth-century historical novelists such as Emily Lawless, New Woman writers such as Sarah Grand, and popular and sensational writers such as Charlotte Riddell and Katherine Cecil Thurston, who bridged the gap between nineteenth-century issue-based fiction, Gothic fiction and, in Thurston’s case, self-reflexive modernism.

Revival Fiction

This chapter examines Irish realist fiction produced during the era of the Irish Revival, particularly between 1890 and 1916. It argues that realist writing by authors such as George Moore, Emily Lawless, Shan F. Bullock, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce stands in subtle but definite contrast to conventional nineteenth-century realist fiction. Writing from a distinctly naturalist perspective, these authors challenge the conventions both of realism and idealism in their representation of the past and its orientation towards the future. Rather than revive an idealized past in the name of the Irish nation, they deploy the past (as narrative, as trope, as misrecognition) as part of a critical reflection on that nation and its futurity.

Nature and the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

The environmental humanities are one of the most exciting and rapidly expanding areas of interdisciplinary study, and this collection of essays is a pioneering attempt to apply these approaches to the study of nineteenth-century Ireland. By bringing together historians, geographers, and literary scholars, new insights are offered into familiar subjects and unfamiliar subjects are brought out into the light. Essays re-considering O’Connellism, Lord Palmerston, and Isaac Butt rub shoulders with examinations of agricultural improvement, Dublin’s animal geographies, and Ireland’s healing places. Literary writers like Emily Lawless and Seumas O’Sullivan are looked at anew, encouraging us to re-think Darwinian influences in Ireland and the history of the Irish literary revival, and transnational perspectives are brought to bear on Ireland’s national park history and the dynamics of Irish natural history. Much modern Irish history is concerned with access to natural resources, whether this reflects the catastrophic effect of the Great Famine or the conflicts associated with agrarian politics, but historical and literary analyses are rarely framed explicitly in these terms. The collection responds to the ‘material turn’ in the humanities and contemporary concern about the environment by re-imagining Ireland’s nineteenth century in fresh and original ways.

Emily Lawless and Charles Darwin: an Irish mystery

While no original autograph letters between the Hon. Miss Emily Lawless and Charles Darwin are known, Darwin was impressed by her observations and encouraged her to submit to Nature a manuscript account of fertilization of plants. This manuscript cannot be traced, nor can her note hypothesizing about the role of the transparent burnet moth in pollination in The Burren, County Clare, which apparently prompted Darwin to make contact with her.