Fiction: 'John, you know when Mother was young she was hired out at Allen's over at Rushey. Well what you don't know is that she had a baby. Allen was the father. Then she was taken from Allen's and Father married her. It was very hard for Mother, John. She had a baby every year after that."
From the seed of this short conversation with his mother, John Throne's first novel grew. It tells the "unadorned and searing tale", as Gerald Dawe accurately puts it, of Margaret Wallace, a Protestant country girl who is hired out at the age of 12, works under brutal conditions at a farm where she sleeps in a barn, with the rats for company, and gets no time off at all, even to go to church on Sunday. Her employer rapes her at regular intervals. When she becomes pregnant he arranges to have her married off to Campbell, a man almost three times her age - but still only 38, to her 14. Her husband is even more ghastly than her employer. He is violent, and one of those Irishmen who, like the Bull McCabe in The Field, doesn't talk:
He almost spoke to her about her mother's wake. But he did not . . . To speak to her other than to give her orders or to criticize her for not carrying out his orders correctly, was threatening to him. By asking her to give her opinion, especially to talk about her feelings, even on such a topic as her mother's death, would be to treat her as a real person, not a pair of hands. Or a place to put his thing.
Campbell is a man without one single redeeming feature. His brutish character, and those of the farmer Allen and of Margaret's own father, are described in terms so harsh that they bring the novel very close to the border of the ridiculous. But in spite of this and several other flaws it is a compelling book, thanks to its powerful subject matter and Throne's gift for storytelling. A social history, but much more, it is a powerful story of a victim who gradually overcomes misfortune and finds happiness and independence.
Indeed, this book forces one to reassess what good literature is. There is no sense in which The Donegal Woman is a literary novel. It fails artistically on several counts, and is unabashedly political - being both radically socialist and feminist. If it were written in Irish there would be a classification for it: an litríocht réigiúnach. And if one looked to visual art for an analogy, the Tory Island painters provide a possible comparison. It has just that mix of "naivety" and surefootedness, spontaneity and artfulness, that we find in the pictures of John Dixon. I am not sure which category of English literature in Ireland will accommodate it - but whatever its genre, it deserves a place on everyone's shelves.
In a season when The Devil Wears Prada delivers to our cinema screens a story as slick as it is false about the exploitation of young women by capitalist industry, The Donegal Woman provides an alternative exploration of that theme, and one that has the sweet ring of authenticity. It is a powerful reminder of how poor, vulnerable women were treated in holy Protestant and Catholic Ireland, less than 100 ago, when the devil wore homespun linen and Donegal tweed.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's novel, Hurlamaboc (Cois Life, 2006), has just won the Oireachtas prize for fiction for young people. Her new novel in English, Anna Kelly Sweeney, will be published next year
The Donegal Woman By John Throne Drumkeen Press, 431pp. €14.99