2021
The Belated Discovery of a Role Model nes sa o’mah o ny
T
he lack of women role models in Irish literature has often been commented upon. When I studied literature in University College Dublin in the early 1980s, you would have been hard pressed to find examples of women writers on the curriculum. I do remember we studied Maria Edgeworth and Emily Dickinson, but when we entered the twentieth century, the reading lists were determinedly masculine, set with great confidence and conviction by a predominantly male faculty. Indeed, the nearest we got to the feminine in some classes was when a lecturer described Leopold Bloom as a ‘womanly’ man. If there was a living, breathing source of women writers whose texts we might study, they weren’t sharing that information in the tile-floored corridors of Belfield. The fact that the three Es—Eilis Dillon, Eiléan Ní Chuileanáin and Eavan Boland—were already well published Irish women writers—was neither here nor there. But I didn’t see myself as a writer then, so my concerns about lack of exemplars were retrospective. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to question the bias that was to become so evident in later years. Great writers were male and dead, and that was that. And so it continued until I made my first tentative steps into the world of literature in the mid-nineties, and began to discover that not only were there living, breathing women writers out there, they were in plentiful supply in Ireland. Their words could be found in pamphlets, collections, the occasional anthology. And even if some of those anthologies had to be published to redress the balance of the absence of women in other anthologies, they were still providing opportunities for me, and others like me, to get myself heard. And yet when I first read Eavan Boland (1944–2020), her memoir Object Lessons, not a collection of poetry—I could still be shocked that a woman might write so seriously about her own poetics, be so concerned with her own position as a poet and a woman in Ireland. That seemed to me to be man’s work—a woman positioning herself in such a way seemed unseemly to me. The conditioning of a third level education had yet to wear off. But as ever, with poetry, the cure for such lack of awareness is to read, and to listen. I remember attending a reading of Eavan’s in Dublin in the late 1990s—I think it must have been around the publication of her collection The Lost Land. The venue was the Royal Irish Academy on Dawson Street, I seem to remember, and Eavan’s reading was typically lucid, precise and provoking. When the reading had ended, the crowd gathered for the book signing, and yet I felt there was a distance between us and the poet who had engrossed them over the previous forty minutes. Shyness, perhaps, or diffidence, on both sides. We hadn’t yet learned how to read this poet, this woman whose purpose had a seriousness we 164
The Lowell Review
