Irish women have been largely written out of Irish history. The new volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing will be full of previously unheard voices clamouring to be heard and will change our view of the past
As they emerged from 1,400 years of women's history, the editors of the final two volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing were in buoyant form. It was their audience at Galway's Town Hall Theatre on Wednesday evening who seemed overwhelmed by the scale of the project. As we scanned the list of section headings for Volumes IV and V, Irish Women's Writing and Traditions, the mass of material researched, recovered and presented seemed hard to digest, and the response was somewhat muted.
This gathering, part of the programme of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, was billed as a debate, but, since audience members were being presented with an outline of the two volumes' contents for the first time, they could hardly be expected to have
anything other than preliminary responses and queries. Informed debate will have to await the publication of the two volumes in September by Cork University Press.
This staggered approach to publication is a clever move on the part of the editors: it gives readers and commentators plenty of notice and, ideally, should propel the critical response in the autumn beyond the phase of instant reactions and verdicts.
Wednesday night's presentation was part of the preparatory process; it was an informative presentation of the editorial approaches taken to the research by four of its editors: Máirín Ní Dhonnchadha, Mary O'Dowd, Siobhán Kilfeather and Clair Wills.
The publication of this ambitious work of collective scholarship has been keenly anticipated since it was first proposed 11 years ago. Initially, it was conceived as a supplementary volume to The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes I-III, published in 1991. The anthology, under the general editorship of Seamus Deane, provoked heated debate and received criticism from a number of quarters. Many feminist scholars and commentators were critical of its inadequate representation of women's writing and of feminist critical perspectives in general. The fact that there were no women on the editorial board was an additional grievance. In response, Deane invited some of the project's critics to discuss the possibility of a fourth volume.
As the eight editors (all women) from different academic backgrounds - historians, Irish language scholars and literature specialists - began their research, they decided that two volumes would be needed to do justice to the wealth of "interesting, important and exciting material that emerged even on our first investigation", they write in their preface. Each of the eight editors worked with sub-section editors from a variety of different backgrounds, both academic and non-academic. They worked collaboratively and collectively.
Without a close study of the two volumes, it's impossible to say whether this is a successful approach, or whether an overall editor might have made a useful contribution. Also, although these two volumes will be fully indexed and cross-referenced with the earlier volumes, the concern inevitably remains that they will always seem to be a tokenistic afterthought. Perhaps a sixth volume, an abridged version of the entire anthology, could be published some time in the future, in an attempt at integration.
As Kilfeather, editor of the section on "Sexuality, 1600-2000", stresses, the editors are not interested in proposing a canon of major Irish women writers, nor is this "an anthology of literary writing as such". Their aim is not simply to champion forgotten literary women; it is much more ambitious than that. The two volumes take a broad, interdisciplinary approach to the political, cultural, sexual, social and literary history of women in Ireland from 600 AD to the present. They set out to provide "a set of contexts for understanding how women have lived in Ireland". It is a work of reclamation and recovery; the sources they are presenting are intended to be a resource for historical research.
The first three volumes of the Field Day Anthology had already demonstrated the degree to which academic literary studies now include broad cultural studies, and so the term "writing" was favoured in the anthology's title, rather than "literature".
The editors of Volumes IV and V have further expanded the definition of the term "writing" to encompass "the way in which people use words". All kinds of texts and documentary sources, which could not be classified as literary, are included - in many cases for the first time - and there is an entire section, edited by Angela Bourke, on the oral tradition, including the song tradition.
For historian O'Dowd, editor of the section on "Politics 1500-2000", one of the key questions was how women exercised a public voice before they had access to political institutions, or even had a vote. The early documents she presents are descriptions by men of women's political activity, rather than sources written by women. Even a woman as powerful as the 16th-century Gaelic leader Grace O'Malley is documented only by petitions written in English that she sent to Elizabeth I.
Since women tended not to write on political subjects for publication until the 19th century, O'Dowd had to draw on private sources: letters and diaries. The 20th-century sections include sources as diverse as parliamentary speeches, pamphlets and extracts from statements by presidents of the Irish Countrywoman's Association.
Finally, there's a wide selection from the wealth of political journalism by women in the past four decades, who "have had a powerful impact on Irish society and often had a louder voice than many elected politicians", O'Dowd says.
For Irish scholar Ní Dhonnchadha, the lack of space given to the Irish language in the anthology's first three volumes was a motivating force behind her work on the first section, "Medieval to Modern: Presences and Represenations, 600-1900".
"Academics in the Irish language were muted in their commentary on the Anthology. In general, they seem to feel some introversion and shyness about entering into the cultural debate," she says. For her, this was an opportunity to change that, to address our "woeful ignorance about our Gaelic past" and to provide "a provocative feminist context in which to present the Irish language material".
The feminist context is evident in the grouping of texts on the theme of "the construction of sexuality, of virginity and non-virginity", for example. She has traced themes such as the feminisation of landscape and the female personification of sovereignty, or of colonised Ireland - images familiar from Irish poetry, which "ramify", as she puts it. She was excited to find that she was discovering new texts all the time. All Irish language sources have been translated, in many cases in specially commissioned versions by writers such as Derek Mahon, Seamus Deane and Moya Cannon.
In many ways, London-based literary scholar Wills had the most unenviable task. In her section, "Contemporary Writing, 1960-2000", she had to make choices from the explosion of writing by women in recent decades. "The 1990s material was the most difficult," she says. "I need more distance from it before I can judge it." While there are sub-sections on contemporary poetry, drama and fiction, compiled by three sub-section editors, Wills was very concerned to move away from narrowgenre-based definitions of women's writing and to acknowledge the fluidity of forms currently favoured by women: "fiction, autobiography, confessional writing, historical writing, cultural commentary, analysis, memoir . . ."
The final parts of her section examine the "Politics of Sexuality in the Republic, 1965-2000" and highlight "the way women's journalistic writing feeds into other genres of creative writing", while the sub-section on "Women in the North of Ireland, 1969-2000" throws up a range of writing that emphasises testimony and personal witness.
The editors hope to "challenge existing canons of Irish writing, existing versions of history, existing cultural myths". There are many questions still to be asked, of course, which can't be answered until we have the two volumes in our hands in September. But from the section headings presented to us, and from the clarity and confidence of the editorial approach as described on Wednesday, it's clear that the they are going to be an absolutely invaluable resource for anyone interested in Irish culture and history, in how we have become who and what we are.
Clair Wills spoke for her fellow editors when she considered how the project had affected her: "I thought I knew what we would find, but there were many, many surprises. It's been very exciting finding it all and I've learned so much."
The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Vols IV and V will be published by Cork University Press in September. A list of contents and editors is available on
www.corkuniversitypress.com
