What with telecommunications and electronic mail, the days of lovely, long, gassy letters written on onionskin paper in a deliciously sloping hand that take an entire day to read, never mind write, are all but gone, and with them is the distinctive art of letter writing. In addition to tracing Irish women's tenacity, firm convictions, and frequently thwarted efforts to be taken seriously, however, this anthology of 89 letters contains some which are beautifully crafted.
Those written between the 18th and 20th centuries tend to be particularly redolent of place and circumstance. Mary Ann McCrack en's 18th-century letters to her brother, Harry Joy McCracken, and to Thomas Russell (both of whom were executed for their involvement in the United Irishmen) are fraught with "frustration and indignation" at the political and social situations of Ireland. On the other hand, Mary Delaney (who wasn't Irish at all), sings in her letters about the charms of a visit to Wicklow and the "great pomp" in Dublin around St Cecilia's Day, 1731.
Later, in the early 19th century, Mary Cumming describes in detail her voyage across the Atlantic with her ever-attentive husband. Only in a following letter, which details the death of her daughter, does her dissatisfaction with her lot become evident. Lily Yeats, writing to her brother, Willy, early in the 20th century, at once demonstrates an insatiable appetite for business, a sensitivity towards artistic endeavour, and a scurrilous intolerance of lesser beings.
The last letters in the anthology, by Maura O'Halloran, provide extraordinary detail of her experiences in a Zen temple in Tokyo shortly before her tragic death in 1982, at the age of 27.
What all these women have accomplished through written detail in their letters is analogous to what is so effortlessly accomplished today with the enclosure of a few photographs.
What is more, many of these letters also give a three-dimensional portrait of their authors' characters normally only to be encountered in fiction. Such characterisation could be expected, perhaps, of the occasionally epistolary novelist Maria Edgeworth, but the spontaneous and highly descriptive letters from the emigrants, Mary Craig Cumming, Brigid Burke and Maura O'Hal loran, are sheer magic. In them, the reader is privy to the authors' psychological motivation and emotional state, their physical presence, and the way in which they deal with people, their sociological dimension.
Edna O'Brien closes her brief foreword with the tentative reservation that she "would like more, many more" letters in this anthology. I agree. In addition, though, I have grave reservations about Laurence Flanagan's selection of only those letters which have been previously published: surely, as an archivist, he could have dug up extant letters by Irish women from a broader spectrum of society which were not so well-known.
Another quibble is that, despite Flanagan's defence in his introduction, the inclusion of letters by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte, as Irish as Yorkshire pudding, is also a travesty. Further, while Flanagan provides a brief biography of each woman before giving excerpts from her letters, his "selected biographies" include only laudatory words about the men to whom these women were connected. Perhaps I read the text wrongly, but it would seem that Flanagan regards these letters by so-called Irish women to be of interest only because of their relationships with men more commendable than themselves. His biographies, therefore, serve to belie the independent, even defiant, spirit in which most of the letters were written.
Having said all that, this anthology is valuable for its portrayal of the art of letter writing, and should be read, lest we forget that most distinctive of nearly demode art forms.
Ellen Beardsley is a writer and critic
