The Flowering, one of many fine stories in this superb collection of stories by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, tells the imagined story of Sally Rua, a young woman in rural Donegal at the turn of the 20th century. A woman comes to the village to teach the girls there embroidery; Sally Rua soon surpasses her teacher, and learns how to work in appliqué on fine net. She creates extraordinary designs of her own, pieces that are sold in big shops in Dublin, but when her father dies, she has to give up her needlework, with devastating results.
Decades later, a woman called Lennie thinks of this story and “does not see much difference between history and fiction, between painting and embroidery, between either of them and literature. Or scholarship. Or building houses… The essential skills of learning to manipulate the raw material, to transform it into something orderly and expressive, to make it, if not better or more beautiful, different from what it was originally and more itself, apply equally to all of these exercises.”
Those lines could serve as the manifesto driving Ní Dhuibhne’s work in these skilfully crafted stories, which explore Irish women’s lives, their shifting languages and, in some cases, their art over the last century and a half.
The stories appear in roughly chronological publication order though, frustratingly, the individual stories are not dated. Her writing is clear-eyed, unsentimental but humane, with a delicious sense of humour that peeks through at just the right moment, studded with wonderfully vivid imagery: deer and beaver skins in a Montana cabin are “like flat maps of animals”; a valley village suddenly bursts into Christmas light.
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Ní Dhuibhne is a folklorist, and there is a hint of the dark and inevitable magic of folk tales in some of the stories, especially the brilliant Little Red, which ends up like a cross between the eponymous fairy tale and Shirley Jackson’s domestic nightmare, Like Mother Used To Make. Some of the brilliant stories in this book are full of narrative incident, taking place over days, weeks, and years; others take place in a single day, or even a single hour. But all of them contain whole lives, and whole worlds.
