Claiming and Transforming an "Entirely Gentlemanly Artifact": Ireland's Attic Press

Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesCanadian Association of Irish Studies

Claiming and Transforming an "Entirely Gentlemanly Artifact": Ireland's Attic PressAuthor(s): Patricia FerreiraSource: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jul., 1993), pp. 97-109Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25512953 .

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Claiming and Transforming an "Entirely Gentlemanly Artifact":

Ireland's Attic Press

PATRICIA FERREIRA

In November of 1991 the long-awaited Field Day Anthology of Irish

Writing was published by Field Day Publications. The three-volume edition, which spans fourteen centuries of Irish literary history, initially gleaned outstanding reviews in North America. From the New York Times to the Irish

Echo, critics for the most part hailed the anthology as a defining work.1 In

Europe and particularly in Ireland, however, Field Day's reception was far less

favorable. The anthology drew sharp criticism predominantly because of the absence of women from its editorial board, the sparse number of women writers

included, and the lack of attention paid to significant events in Irish history which had particular impact on Irish women. Such omissions were particularly

vexing when one considers that the anthology itself was marketed as "a

landmark event in twentieth-century literature" as well as "the most

comprehensive exhibition of the wealth and diversity of Irish literature ever

published."2 The reaction grew so heated that in England, the London Irish Women's Centre picketed readings (Lennon 1) while one of its members, in a

letter to the Irish Times said Field Day "in its present form, has no place in the 20th century" and suggested that it be recalled (Crowe 11).

Not all those with feminist sympathies felt the anthology an unworthy achievement. In fact, Siobhan Kilfeather, lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, said, "Those critics who argue . . . that the anthology would have

been better never to have been published and that all the useful knowledge in it should be sent back to the dustier recesses of libraries strike me as profoundly anti-intellectual" (ACIS/CAIS position paper). Nevertheless, debates were held on the anthology at venues that included the Dublin Irish Writers' Centre, the London-Irish Book Fair, the 1992 joint session of the American Conference of Irish Studies and the Canadian Association of Irish Studies, and the Yeats Summer School.

Beyond the ultimate challenge to the integrity of the Field Day effort, such debates were significant because they brought to the forefront building consternation over the presence of women in Ireland's well-established literary history. Indeed, the very tenacity with which women such as Eavan Boland,

Evelyn Conlon, Ailbhe Smyth, Patricia Haberstroh, Nell McCafferty and others were able to argue their case surrounding the product and production of Field Day is an indication of sophisticated feminist exchange which has been

going on for many Irish feminist critics, scholars, and writers particularly over



98 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

the last ten years. Important to my focus is the fact that much of that dialogue has been a consequence of Attic Press publications, Ireland's first and only feminist press. In fact, many of those involved in the "FieldDay debate," have

either been published by Attic, are members of its editorial board, or are its

defenders in critical articles.3 Those not immediately involved in the polemic over FieldDay, but no less significant to Attic, are Mary Paul Keane and Roisin

Conroy, founders of the press. This essay primarily addresses the ways in which Attic has counteracted

omissions and understatements of the role of women in Ireland's literary

history and contemporary literary scene. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Attic

has functioned as a mechanism of empowerment for Irish women, privileging their experiences as well as their voices in a variety of ways. To understand the

significance of such authorization, I relate the circumstances which mediated

Attic's evolution. Eventually, by employing women workers, publishing women writers, and directing texts at women readers, the press redefined the

relationship between power and publishing in Ireland to include the overall

agenda of the contemporary feminist movement.4

Essays by Dale Spender and Lillian S. Robinson have been helpful in

linking feminist inquiry directly to the publishing industry. In her article "The

Gatekeepers: A Feminist Critique of Academic Publishing," Spender borrows

the term "gatekeepers" from Dorothy Smith to define those within an academic

community who "set the standards, produce the social knowledge, monitor

what is admitted to the systems of distribution, and decree the innovations in

thought, or knowledge, or values" (187). Because many ofthe "gatekeepers" are editors of journals, referees or reviewers, or advisors to publishers, Spender

asserts: "they are in a position to determine what gets published and what does not" (187). Additionally, Spender warns that often those who are in a position to select "have a vested interest in preserving the authority of their work" and therefore "suppress fundamental novelties which challenge" an established theoretical concept (191). As a result, according to Spender, and Robinson, in her article "Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon," a

gender-based silencing has occurred within the publishing industry because the majority of "gatekeepers" are men. There has been "neglect, distortion, and

misreading" of women' s experience (Robinson 213). Robinson is particularly interested in the ways such silence and silencing have manifested themselves in realms of literature, ultimately influencing "course syllabi, anthologies, and

widely commented-upon 'standard authors'" to such a degree that they have become for the most part "over the course of habitual teaching and study" an

"entirely gentlemanly artifact" (213). In Ireland, Robinson's contentions are most clearly illustrated by surveys

which document the low numbers of women being published. The first and most frequently quoted study was conducted by Women in Publishing (WIP), a group organized by Mary Paul Keane, one ofthe founders of Attic Press. WIP



The Attic Press 99

enabled the few Irish women involved in publishing to establish professional links with one another in the hopes of improving the status of women in the

industry. Keane explained in a 1992 interview that beyond its filial advantages, WIP was also motivated by a 1983 survey that they conducted of all the books

published in Ireland that year. The results indicated that 11 percent were written

by women, and, of that total, nine percent were published by Arlen House?

The Women's Press?while the remaining two percent were published by Ireland's mainstream presses.5

Such conclusions confirmed the need for more women to be primary decision makers within the publishing industry. This is not to say that as of

1983 women were not already in such roles. Jessie Lendennie, who started

Salmon Publishing, and Catherine Rose, founder of the forementioned Arlen

House, were contemporary pioneers who encouraged many women writers to

publish their work. In the early 1980s, when Lendennie first began The Salmon, now one of Ireland's more established literary periodicals, she remembers "how little work was submitted by women" (Haberstroh, Irish Literary

Supplement 6). Eventually, because of Lendennie's commitment to see more

Irish women writers in print, two of Salmon's first full volumes were collections of poetry by women, Eva Bourke's Gonella (1985) and Rita Ann Higgin's Goddess on the Mervue Bus (1986). Likewise, Books Ireland cited Arlen

House as the press which "launched many women authors on their writing careers and did much to redress the unbalanced representation of women in

Irish publishing" ("Women's Press Renaissance" 41).

Despite the efforts of Lendennie and Rose, there was still a need for an

independent house whose agenda would be unabashedly feminist and whose

writers as well as workers would be women.6 As it happened, in 1983 while WIP was conducting its survey, Roisin Conroy, Attic's other eventual founder,

received government funding for her group, Irish Feminist Information (IFI), to train 12 unemployed women in publishing activities in the hopes that their contributions to the industry would be "socially significant and innovative"

("Ladies Choice 55"). Eventually, members of both WIP and IFI joined

together, forming Attic Press, and, under the leadership of Keane and Conroy, published a collection of Nell McCafferty's essays. Today Attic's list includes more than 100 books and their annual turnover is estimated to be around

?400,000 (Donnelly 57). Simultaneous with the increase of Irish women writers in print was Attic's

ability to introduce feminist approaches to the examination and interpretation of Irish culture and politics. Prior to its founding, Keane said, "There was

nothing written about the women's movement. There was no material that was

emanating from an Irish context that was specific to Irish women. There was no documenting of the history and there was no theoretical analysis of the context in which this history was taking place." More central to feminist interests in literature was Attic's facility of concepts surrounding gender that




would expand the ways Irish writing is studied. Lillian Robinson makes clear

that feminism is not "simply a reiterated attack" on the institutionalization of literature and literary inquiry. Central to feminist ideologies are the ways that

they suggest "alternatives to the male-dominated memberships and attitudes of

the accepted canon" (213). The poet Eavan Boland's tract A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a

National Tradition, published by Attic in 1989, epitomizes the press's ability to foster what editorial consultant Ailbhe Smyth calls "provocative analytical

work" (Irish Literary Supplement 1988, 6). Boland's essay was the first in a

series of "LIP Pamphlets" which were developed by Attic to provide Irish women writers, thinkers, and activists with a forum to address "contemporary issues and controversies." They range in subject matter from an analysis of

Ireland as a post-colonial state to a study of feminist morality. The LIP series

is one of Attic's most popular publications. Boland's pamphlet was so

successful that it has been re-printed several times and published in the United

States by American Poetry Review in 1990, retitled "Outside History." That same year she also published a book of selected poems with the same title.7

In the essay, Boland recounts the period of time she spent at Trinity

College in Dublin where she realized that the world of Irish poetry was

predominantly male. "Now and again, in discussion, you heard a woman's

name," she writes. "But the lived vocation, the craft witnessed by a human

life?that was missing" (11). Instead, Boland found that a woman's place within the Irish ppetic establishment, where ideas of nation are a fundamental

construct, was confined to "a rhetoric of imagery" where womanhood functions as a "passive projection of a national idea" particularly in Aisling poems and

through such figures as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, Dark Rosaleen, and The Old Woman ofthe Roads (7, 13, 16-18). Such motifs reduced womanhood to the

mythic, emblematic, and ornamental rather than an experience full of complex feelings and aspirations. Through such tropes women are disempowered even

though they embody the all-powerful political structures of nation. Toril Moi's essay "Feminist, Female, Feminine" explains how such

imagining of womanhood becomes potently regressive. She demonstrates the

destructiveness of a "patriarchal symbolic order" because it positions women on the margin or "border-line" of order. By being on the edge, Moi believes women are viewed either as villainess, "representing darkness and chaos," as

is the case with Lilith or the Whore of Babylon, or they are elevated, as Eavan Boland suggests in the Irish poetic tradition, "venerat[ed] ... as Virgins and

Mothers of God." Indeed, like Boland, Moi argues that neither position offers

any truth about womanhood (127). Instead, Boland writes, the Irish woman's

suffering throughout history, her "human truths of survival and humiliation," her "true voice and vision" were "routinely excluded" (19). Such tropes are

particularly disturbing in light of the Irish poetic tradition which sought to



The Attic Press 101

empower an impoverished and disenfranchised populous whose very language was outlawed by English colonial rule.

Inasmuch as her essay is about her inability to "accept the nation formulated ... by Irish poetry and its traditions," A Kind of Scar also outlines Boland's

attempt to "repossess" the concept of nation. "Nationality" often speaks to

issues of "identity" in the Irish literary tradition. Although it is not "the only

sign of identity," as Ailbhe Smyth states in the introduction to her anthology Wildish Things, when the "struggle to achieve [identity] has been bitter and

hard-fought," nationality can never be "assumed" nor "go without saying" (8).

Consequently, Smyth writes that concepts of nationhood have been a means to

"name" oneself in Irish writing. Because the experiences of Irish women have

often been negated from the vantage point of nationhood, however, of particular

importance to Boland was her desire to "relocate" herself "within the Irish

poetic tradition" in a way that would allow Irish women more of a place within

such concepts of "Irishness" (20). Rather than re-writing the "passive texture

of that tradition" with its "rhyming queens and muses," Boland writes that she

seeks to explore the "emblematic relation" between her "own feminine

experience and a national past" (20). With such relocation, Boland suggests that she hopes to give voice to herself as well as other Irish women who were

silenced as "icons and figments" (24). She states:

I began to think there was indeed a connection; that my womanhood and my nationhood were meshed and linked at some root. It was not just that I had a womanly feeling for those women who waited with handcarts, went into the sour

stomach of ships and even?according to terrible legend? eyed their baby's haunches speculatively in the hungers of the 1840s. It was more than that. I was excited by the idea that if there really was an emblematic relation between the

defeats of womanhood and the suffering of a nation,. .. then

Irishness and womanhood, those tormenting

fragments of my youth, could at last stand in for one another. . . . the laws of metaphor beckoned me. (21)

Boland's location of real-life experiences of womanhood within the construct of nationhood becomes an effective way to make visible what was before invisible in the Irish poetic establishment that defined "Irishness."

Gerardine Meaney, another LIP pamphleteer, discusses how poet Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill challenges, to borrow from Moi, the "patriarchal symbolic order"

by writing in Irish. In her pamphlet Sex and Nation: Women in Irish Culture and Politics, Meaney quotes Ni Dhomhnaill who has argued that language often functions absolutely, providing a variety of words for experiences "which are exclusive to or predominantly those of men" (20). Meaney then




asks, "How then can women use language, particularly how can women write,

without succumbing to the inherent masculine bias in the languages of patriarchal cultures?" Ni Dhomhnaill answers that the Irish language provides "'the

language of the Mothers'" and allows women as well as men the ability to

"break out of the strait-jacket of patriarchal repression and 'linguistic

schizophrenia'" (20). Such preoccupation with the silence of Irish women as writers should not

be misconstrued to imply that before Attic Press women were unrepresented in

Irish literature. On the contrary, writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Edith

Somerville, Martin Ross, Kate O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin and

others have long held positions of literary prominence both in Ireland and

internationally. Additionally, Lady Augusta Gregory was influential in

instigating and nurturing the modern Irish literary revival which included such

authors as W.B. Yeats, J.M Synge, and Sean O'Casey. Lady Gregory was also a founder of the national theatre of Ireland known as the Abbey. Indeed, Ann

Owens Weekes, in her book Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition, writes that, "Despite centuries of oppressive conditions, Irish women have

written . . . and judging by what survives of their writing, they have written

well" (2). The problem, then, has best been articulated by several anthologies of writing by Irish women published over the last ten years as well as an

increasing amount of critical inquiry devoted specifically to Irish women

authors.

If there are links between the variety of work being produced, they are a

desire to document the particular obstacles faced by Irish women who wish(ed) to write, to center Irish women as executors of an Irish voice in the face of such

impediments, as well as to examine if and how that voice is distinct because of both its Irishness and its femaleness. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill's article "What

Foremothers?," published in Poetry Ireland, charts the "extreme hostility" faced by women writers, including herself, in Ireland. She remembers a

proverb heard often while growing up which evokes the animosity:

na tri rudai is measa i mbaile; -

tuiodoir fluich, sioladoir tiubh

file mna

The three worst curses that could befall a village; a wet thatcher (who lets the rain in) a heavy sower (who broadcasts seeds too densely) a woman poet (no reason given; none needed). (24)

Most moving is Ni Dhomhnaill's attempts to ferret out women writers from earlier centuries. Through bits and pieces of testimony that have survived into the twentieth-century, it is evident that Irish women always wrote;



The Attic Press 103

however, Ni Dhomhnaill laments the odds were against their survival in print. "From scattered references throughout folk-lore collections," she writes, "we

know that they existed, but that is about all" (24). Like Ni Dhomhnaill, Janet Madden-Simpson, in the Introduction to her

anthology Women's Part: An Anthology of Short Fiction By and About

Irishwomen, 1890-1960, writes about the ways that women were inhibited

from writing. Given the social pressures within Irish society pronounced by both the government and the church, women writers often "self- annihilat[ed]" their work, according to Madden-Simpson, by "suppress[ing] or redirect[ing] ideas or impulses which might be considered unseemly" (6-7). For example,

Katherine Tynan, considered the first Renaissance writer because of her use of

traditional Irish material before Douglas Hyde, AE, or Yeats, always deflected

her readers away from her work and her image as a writer. Eventually, Tynan deferred to Yeats calling him "'the onlie begetter of Irish poetry' and dedicated a volume to 'he who taught me'" (7-8). Another example is George Egerton who, according to Madden-Simpson, saw herself as a "medium" in order to

deliberately distance herself from "the business of writing" (8-9). Both Tynan and Egerton demonstrate the extreme caution exercised by Irish women when

they stepped out of their roles as wives and mothers, legitimated by patriarchal

society.

Madden-Simpson also writes about a kind of ripple effect that occurred in terms of the critical attention devoted to writing by Irish women because of their reluctance and fear of taking themselves seriously as writers. She states

that because of such apprehensions women failed to "construct critical standards... which can be so influential in establishing an atmosphere for

serious appraisal" (6). As a result, Madden-Simpson writes that women were

accorded "pejorative status" in Ireland's "impressive literary tradition." Left to male scholars and critics, women were nearly negated altogether from

bibliographies, research, critical studies, literature collections in library holdings and reading lists for courses in Anglo-Irish literature (1-3).8 In a survey of

eight critical works which range from 1903 to 1981, Madden-Smith argues that "commentators who have shaped the Anglo-Irish literary tradition" have left

readers with an "appallingly ignorant" and "one-sided cultural imprinting of

literary taste" (3). A plethora of recent articles and publications fully confirm and document Madden-Simpson's assertion. Recently in Poetry Ireland,

Richard Hayes writes that in the journal's first 21 issues only "one-fifth of the three hundred and thirty or so contributors" have been women. Only Thomas

McCarthy, during his editorship of issues nine through 12, asked why the women he met in workshops had vanished from the writing scene (62).

Recent attempts to make up for the centuries of neglect have mostly been in the form of anthologies devoted entirely to writing by Irish women. In

addition to Madden-Simpson's, whose collection was one of the first, four other anthologies and two collections of interviews have been published. Attic




alone has been responsible for publishing two of the anthologies, Wildish

Things, edited by Ailbhe Smyth, and Virgins and Hyacinths, edited by Caroline Walsh. In 1993, Attic also issued Unveiling Treasures, a

comprehensive, detailed directory of over 200 Irish women literary writers, edited by Ann Owens Weekes. All ofthe editors seek to exemplify the breadth

and depth of Irish women writers.9 Special periodical issues have also been

devoted entirely to feminism in Ireland and women authors, including the

Midland Review (1986), Women's Studies International Forum (1988), and

the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (1992). And the annual meetings of the

American Conference of Irish Studies and the Canadian Association of Irish

Studies have witnessed an explosion of papers addressing Ireland from a

feminist perspective, demonstrating the vast enterprise of work being undertaken

in a critical milieu to locate Irish women within an authorial framework.

It is within such a context of hyperactivity in literary, political, and social

realms associated with Ireland, that Attic Press is most valuable because of its

ability to promote and sustain Irish women authors and feminism. Adrienne

Rich's indispensable 1973 essay "Toward a Woman-Centered University" advanced her vision of a "feminist renaissance" which would "discover women and our buried or misread history" (126). Central to Rich's dream was

her call for feminists to "question and re-explore the past" and "demand a

humanization of intellectual interests and public measures in the present" (126). Attic Press certainly embodies an Irish awakening of Rich's doctrine for

rebirth.

In addition to the LIP pamphlets, the non-fiction list includes titles that

explore particular political and social events that involve women such as the

"Kerry Babies Case" and Mary Robinson's election as President. The press also has a fiction list, a sequence of "Fairytales for Feminists," titles for girls and adolescent women grouped under the series "Bright Sparks," a series of handbooks designed to inform women on topics which range from premenstrual

syndrome to emigration, an Irish/Women's Studies Reader, and a collection of

essays that explore the politics of abortion in Ireland. In 1988, June Considine

reported in Books Ireland that out of the 25 titles that Attic had in print at that

time, seven made it to the Irish best selling list while 60 percent of its output is exported to the United Kingdom and United States (34). Beyond its own

profit margin, the press's success can be measured by the Irish Arts Council

which in 1991-92 awarded Attic a ?30,000 company profile grant, the largest one given that year to a single publisher. In addition, the press was recognized in a 1987 independent study conducted for the Arts Council as one of Ireland's

"success stories" because of its ability to corner a "new market" in the

publishing industry. More importantly, Attic takes full credit for the increase of women writers

published by the mainstream presses of Ireland. Co-founder Mary Paul Keane

said that because of Attic's success, "mainstream publishing in Ireland sat up



The Attic Press 105

and looked, and said 'there's something in this.'" Accordingly, Keane

continued, "Mainstream publishing has taken a much more active interest in

publishing women's material, books by women, and books pertaining to

women." A survey based on books in print up to November of 1991 and

conducted by The Steeple, a Cork-based poetry magazine, revealed that women writers now account for five percent of Dedalus Press books, 16

percent of Gallery Press books, 11 percent of Raven Arts Press books, and 45

percent of Salmon Press books (5657). In her article "Treason Our Text," Lillian S. Robinson also recognizes that

feminism invites a use of power which not only allows but also encourages difference and diversity within a literary landscape, as well as the ways such a landscape is interpreted. In this sense, Attic's abilities to increase the number

of Irish women writers who are published, to give prominence to their texts, and to allow gender to be part of an Irish literary and political discourse,

epitomize a productive use of power rather than a reductive use which only serves absolute interests. Attic has claimed and transformed what was once

almost an "entirely gentlemanly artifact."

NOTES

1 For the Philadelphia Inquirer, Peter Finn called it a "monumental effort"

while Gregory A. Schirmer said in New YorkNewsday that "the three thick volumes ...

represent a work of unprecedented, stunning scope." Robert

Taylor, for the Boston Globe, wrote that the anthology was "an

indispensable survey of Irish literature" while Mark Harmon, for the Los

Angeles Times, said it was "utterly extraordinary." 2 This statement appeared on promotional flyers, leaflets, brochures and

bookmarks when the anthology was launched in New York in November of 1991.

3 Eavan Boland wrote Attic's first LIP pamphlet, a series of booklets by Irish women writers, thinkers, and activists on topics ranging from

Boland's A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition to

Gretchen Fitzgerald's Repulsing Racism: Reflections on Racism and the Irish. Evelyn Conlon published her novel Stars in the Daytime with Attic, as well as a collection of short stories titled My Head is Opening. Her criticism dealing with Irish women writers has been a regular feature of

Graph, an alternative literary journal. Ailbhe Smyth was the editor of Attic from 1989 to 1991 and editorial consultant until 1992. She published a collection of writing in 1989 by Irish women with Attic titled Wildish

Things: An Anthology of New Irish Women's Writing. Patricia Boyle Haberstroh's recent article "Literary Politics: Mainstream and Margin" is a defense of Attic in response to Katie Donovan's Irish Women Writers

Marginalised by Whom? Attic's first publication was a collection of Nell




McCafferty's essays in 1984 called The Best of Nell. They also published a second collection, titled Goodnight Sisters, as well as A Woman to

Blame: The Kerry Babies Case and Peggy Derry: A Derry Family at War. 4 In the case of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, efforts by those

associated with Attic eventually caused Seamus Deane to concede that the

representation of women in the anthology was deficient. A fourth volume

which will primarily focus on women is underway and scheduled for

publication in 1994. 5 The 1983 survey results were also published in Books Ireland in 1988 and

by Dennis J. Hannon and Nancy Means Wright in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. CJIS, however, incorrectly states that Attic published nine

percent of the 1983 Irish books written by women when, in fact, it was

Arlen House. 6 In her article "The Business of Feminism: Issues in London Feminist

Publishing," Elizabeth Young defines feminist publishing as an "initiative, staffed by women, producing books on feminist issues" (1). Salmon never

exclusively published women and Arlen House eventually began publishing "material on issues not directly involving women" under the Turoe Press

imprint. By 1988, Arlen House had folded. 7 The title is derived from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, whose central

character more than once declares, "And yet there was truth in it; this was

the real chaos which he thought he was describing?so long ago it seemed

now ... Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it

they didn't see us. It was a hell of a state of affairs; we were nowhere" (499 500).

8 Madden-Simpson makes use of Frank O'Connor's 1963 text The Lonely Voice as an example of sexist critical appraisal at its most virulent. In it he

wrote that "the literature of the Irish Literary Renaissance is a peculiarly masculine affair ... it is in society that women belong" (1). Madden

Simpson also takes issue with O'Connor's discussion of Lady Gregory, which "consists of two pointedly humourous anecdotes which emphasise her defective pronunciation of English" (2). She questions why O'Connor

omitted Gregory's influence during a "seminal period in the development of a national literature" as a playwright, folklorist, or even collaborator and

contributor. 9 In the introductions to Wildish Things (Attic, 1989) by Ailbhe Smyth,

Territories of the Voice (Virago, 1990) by Louise DeSalvo, Kathleen

Walsh D'Arcy, and Katherine Hogan, and Stories by Contemporary Irish

Women (Syracuse, 1990) by Daniel J. and Linda M. Casey, all three groups of editors suggest that they wish to make up for past anthologies which

have "largely ignored women" (Casey 10). Likewise, in a collection of

interviews with Irish women writers originally broadcast on Radio Telefis

Eireann, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl (Methuen, 1986), Seamus



The Attic Press 107

Heaney writes in the foreword that the book is valuable insofar as it

displaces "the aura of maleness which still tends to surround that hallowed

word, 'artist'" (xii). And in another interview collection, Sleeping with

Monsters (Polygon, 1990), editors Gillean Sommerville-Arjat and Rebecca

E. Wilson expressed a desire to expand the material available on Scottish

and Irish women poets (xii).

WORKS CITED

Boland, Eavan. "Outside History." American Poetry Review March/April 1990: 32-38.

_. A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition. Dublin: Attic, 1989.

Casey, Daniel J. and Linda M. Casey, eds. Stories by Contemporary Irish

Women. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1990.

Conlon, Evelyn. "Boys Talk." Graph. Summer 1990: 2-3.

_. My Head is Opening. Dublin: Attic, 1987.

_. "Women and Irish Literary Culture." Graph Autumn 1988.

Considine, June. "View from the Attic." Books Ireland March 1988: 33.

Crowe, Mary. "Field Day Anthology." Letter to the Editor. Irish Times 17

December 1991: 11.

DeSalvo, Louis, Kathleen Walsh D'Arcy, and Katherine Hogan, eds. Territories

ofthe Voice: Contemporary Stories by Irish Women Writers. London:

Virago, 1990.

Donnelly, Sally. "Bold Types." Ms, 1-3. (November/December 1990): 57.

Donovan, Katie. Irish Women Writers Marginalised by Whom? Dublin: Raven Arts, 1988.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Finn, Peter. Rev. of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing by Seamus Deane. Philadelphia Inquirer 19 January 1992: 3.

Haberstroh, Patricia B. "Literary Politics: Mainstream and Margin." Canadian

Journal of Irish Studies 18.1 (July 1992): 181-191.

_. Rev. of Oar, by Moya Cannon, Reading the Sunflowers in September, by

Mary O'Donnell, Abigail Brown, by Heather Brett, and A Consideration

of Silk, by Mary O'Malley. Irish Literary Supplement Spring 1992: 6.

Harman, Mark. Rev. of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing by Seamus

Deane. Los Angeles Times Book Review 12 January 1992: 1, 5.

Hayes, Richard. "Poetry Ireland Review, A Review." Poetry Ireland Review

(36) Autumn 1992: 53-66.

Keane, Mary Paul. Personal Interview. 6 August 1992.

Kilfeather, Siobhan. "The Field Day Anthology Debate Position Papers." Distributed at the joint conference ofthe American Conference of Irish Studies (ACIS) and

the Canadian Conference of Irish Studies (CAIS), 10 July 1992.




"Ladies Choice." Editorial. Books Ireland April 1983: 55.

Lennon, Peter. Rev. of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. Guardian

12 December 1991: 23.

Madden-Simpson, Janet, ed. Woman's Part: An Anthology By and About Irish

Women, 1890-1960. Dublin: Arlen House, 1984.

McCafferty, Nell. "Ironic Yarns From a 'Slightly Constitutional' Country." Ms 2.6 (May/June 1992): 16-19.

_. A Woman To Blame: The Kerry Babies Case. Dublin: Attic, 1985.

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Claiming and Transforming an "Entirely Gentlemanly Artifact": Ireland's Attic Press

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