Irishness in North American Women's Writing

Irishness in North American Women’s Writing Ellen McWilliams Irishness in North American Women’s Writing Transatlantic Affinities Ellen McWilliams Department of English University of Exeter Exeter, UK ISBN 978-1-137-53789-8 ISBN 978-1-137-53788-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53788-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover image: © Bernard Canavan, Night Thoughts This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Limited The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom For John and James McWilliams With all my love Acknowledgements I am grateful to Joachim Beug, Angela Bourke, Linda Connolly, Kate Costello-Sullivan, Patricia Coughlan, Alex Davis, Karen Edwards, Rowena Fowler, Regenia Gagnier, Jo Gill, Lee Jenkins, Tim Kendall, Lucy McDi- armid, Piaras Mac Éinrí, Anne Mulhall, Moynagh Sullivan, Reingard Nischik, Maureen O’Connor, Bernard O’Donoghue, Clíona Ó Gall- choir, Tina O’Toole, Eve Patten, Niamh Pattwell, Vivian Valvano Lynch, Bronwen Walter, and Timothy Webb—the academics who built the ladder for so many of us and who remain amongst my most inspiring role models. I would like to thank the many people who supported this research at different stages and the friends, colleagues, and generous editors who offered encouragement and insight at key moments: Rebecca Barr, Sally Barr-Ebest, Claire Bracken, Susan Cahill, Claire Connolly, Eric Falci, Sabrina Fuchs Abrams, Marjorie Howes, Heather Ingman, Anne Sofia Karhio, Margaret Kelleher, Vera Kreilkamp, Gerardine Meaney, Tony Murray, Joanne O’Brien, Deirdre O’Byrne, Muireann O’Cinneide, Anna Pilz, Graham Price, and Paige Reynolds. I am especially grateful to Andrew Blades, Beci Carver, Gabriella Giannachi, Daisy Hay, Adam Hanna, Helen Hanson, Jo Harris, Eddie Jones, Kirsty Martin, Will May, Jo Parker, Henry Power, Debra Ramsey, Andrew Rudd, Laura Salisbury, Vicky Sparey, Lisa Stead, Corinna Wagner, Phil Wickham, and Amanda Williams for conversations about work in progress—I’m not sure I would have completed this book without their vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS support. I owe a particular debt to Lucy McDiarmid for her literary tours of Manhattan and for being a source of gentle encouragement always. I am very lucky to work at the University of Exeter and alongside such kind and inspiring colleagues. I would like to thank all of my colleagues in the Department of English and Film at Exeter for restoring my faith in the idea of a University. Special thanks go to Gwen Morris and Jules Warner for their patience and kindness. I am grateful to Abe Foley, Jo Freer, Kate Montague, Peter Riley, Mark Steven, Rob Turner, Paul Williams, and all my fellow shipmates in the North American and Atlanticist Research Group at Exeter, for their friendship, collegiality, and good humour, and for making Research Away Days so very enjoyable. I am especially thankful to Sinéad Moynihan, whose own work has made such a vital contribution to the fields of Irish Diaspora Studies and Atlantic Studies, for being such a great colleague and friend, particularly during those times when I struggled to keep faith in the project. Vassar College and the New York Public Library provided access to special collections and I would like to thank the resident archivists, Dean Rogers and Tal Nadan, for their expertise and guidance. I am also very grateful to Jay Barksdale for providing a place to work in the Shoichi Noma Study at the New York Public Library. In recent years I have been the beneficiary of a Moore Institute Visiting Fellowship to NUI, Galway and would like to thank Martha Shaughnessy, Kate Thornhill, Daniel Carey, and Louis de Paor, for the warm Galway welcome. I spent time at the Clinton Institute at UCD and wish to thank Catherine Carey and Liam Kennedy for the opportunity to develop the research when it was still in the early stages. Gavin Christopher Doyle and Kate Smyth kindly invited me to share work as part of the Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Seminar Series at Trinity College Dublin and I gained a great deal from the vibrant postgraduate and postdoctoral community there. I am also very grateful for a Visiting Fellowship to the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Free University of Berlin. Foundational work for this book was completed at Fordham Univer- sity, New York, with the support of a Fulbright Scholar Award and I am grateful for the generous assistance of the Fulbright Commission and for the warm welcome I received during my semester at Fordham. I learned a great deal about the Irish in New York from the Irish-American readers who attended the ‘Exile and the Irish Writer’ reading group at the Aisling Irish Community Centre in Woodlawn and it was a privilege to be in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix their company. I am also very grateful to Pat Mosley-Bowie and Richard Mosley in Ottawa for generously sharing their thoughts on the Irish in Canada and for being so kind on the many occasions I ambushed them with too many questions—it has been a pleasure to get to know them (albeit from a distance) and I have gained so much from their stories of family migration to the United States and Canada. Chapter 3 started out as two articles: ‘Avenging “Bridget”: Irish Domestic Servants and Middle-Class America in the Short Stories of Maeve Brennan’ (Irish Studies Review, 2013) and ‘“No Place is Home, It is as It should be”: Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan’ (Eire-Ireland, 2014) and I am grateful to the editors for permission to reproduce a revised version of that material here. I would also like to thank the editors of Women’s Studies for permission to reproduce material in Chapter 2 that was first published as an article, ‘Looking for Irish America in the Memoirs of Mary McCarthy’, in 2020. Bernard Canavan’s ‘Night Thoughts’ appears on the cover of this book and I am most grateful to Bernard for being so typically generous in granting me permission to use his painting in this way. Bernard Cana- van’s achievements as an artist provide an unparalleled visual account of Irish emigrant history and it means a great deal to be able to feature his work here. Special thanks are due to the (at the time anonymous) readers of the final manuscript, Anne Fogarty and Caitriona Moloney, for providing such precise and rigorous reports and to Rebecca Hinsley and the editorial and production teams at Palgrave Macmillan for being so helpful at every stage. As always, I am thankful to, and full of appreciation for, the extended McWilliams-McCarthy family in King’s Lynn, Crick, Cambridge, London, Enniskeane and Tullow. The most important acknowledgements can be found on the dedica- tion page of the book, but deserve to be repeated here. I would like to thank John McWilliams, whose understanding, patience, and love made this book and so many other things possible—there is no better first reader. My final thank you is to James McWilliams for bringing us immeasurable joy and changing our world to technicolour. Contents 1 Transatlantic Affinities: Irishness in North American Women’s Writing 1 Ireland and Transatlantic Literary Studies: Points of Departure 5 Transatlantic Irish Women: Literary and Historical Encounters 14 Works Cited 27 2 Unsettling Irish America: Self-Authorship and the Writing of Mary McCarthy 31 Looking for Irish America in Mary McCarthy’s Life Writing 35 Self-Authorship and Strategies of Evasion in the Memoirs of Mary McCarthy 41 Mary McCarthy and the Making of a New York Intellectual 44 Works Cited 51 3 Irish-American Immigrant Histories and Readings of Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan 55 Irish Domestic Servants and Middle-Class America in Maeve Brennan’s Writing 56 Avenging ‘Bridget’: Servant Insurrections in Maeve Brennan’s Short Stories 61 Maeve Brennan’s ‘Long-Winded Lady’ in Exile 67 xi xii CONTENTS Mapping the Metropolis and the Last Days of New York City 74 Works Cited 79 4 ‘A Genetic Trait’: Alice McDermott’s Irish America 83 Irish-American Futures in Alice McDermott’s Fiction 84 Alice McDermott and the Lives of Irish-American Women 89 ‘Second Edition’: Alice

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