Over the Christmas holiday my thoughts turned again to the Irish Times/James Joyce Centre readers' poll to pick the 10 greatest Irish novels. My own 10 favourite Irish books, not in any particular order, are The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen, The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien, Belinda by Maria Edgeworth, The Real Charlotte by Somerville and Ross, The Railway Station Man by Jennifer Johnston, The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien, Approaching Priests by Mary Leland, No Country for Young Men by Julia O'Faolain, One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden, and Stars in the Daytime by Evelyn Conlon. Actually, this is a fairly random list. I could have chosen other books by the same authors. And yes, I also love reading Joyce. I recognise his greatness. I am awestruck by his talent. But it is personal taste I am talking about here - the kind of books you pick up again and again, for comfort, for reflection, for delight. They are all by women and none of them featured on the Irish Times top 10 list. Why not?
Are there gender differences in the way men and women read? Virginia Woolf certainly thought so. In her essay on "Women and Fiction" she says: "It is probable, however, that both in life and in art the values of a woman are not the values of a man. Thus, when a woman comes to write a novel, she will find that she is perpetually wishing to alter the established values - to make serious what appears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to him important. And for that, of course, she will be criticised; for the critic of the opposite sex will be genuinely puzzled and surprised by an attempt to alter the current scale of values, and will see in it not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental, because it differs from his own."
This is it in a nutshell. Without wishing to open old wounds, the omission of many valuable Irish women writers from the first three volumes of the Field Day anthology - and the editor's genuine surprise when this was pointed out to him - would seem to bear out Woolf's point that, until we reach a point where society is able to transcend gender difference altogether, there will continue to be differences in what women and men value in fiction.
My choice of 10 best Irish novels will seem trivial because it centres on several authors who might be seen, in the light of the established Irish literary canon, indisputably minor. The point is they are not minor to me. Now my sense of taste may be criticised, or even my literary judgment, but that cannot prevent these books being important to me. Woolf again: "This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room." I love Elizabeth Bowen's delicate dissections of the human heart, the sophistication of her dialogue, her polished, intricate style. I admire Kate O'Brien for her courage in expressing views on politics and sexuality which were far in advance of her time. I enjoy Maria Edgeworth's wit and the panorama of Irish life found in Somerville and Ross. Jennifer Johnston and Edna O'Brien have in their different ways been pioneers in writing about Irish women and their place, or lack of it, in the Irish nation in the 20th century. And so on.
I teach courses on Irish women's writing and I still believe it is valid to separate women writers in this way. When Irish women writers are read together patterns emerge which are not always obvious when they are simply slotted into the concerns of male authors.
There are certain common themes in Irish women's writing, such as the female Bildungsroman, motherhood, a resistance to myth-making about women, a more fluid sense of what to be Irish entails. And this is one of the reasons why, I believe, Irish women writers have been underrated. They interrupt or run counter to accepted notions of what the Irish novel should be doing. Hence they are left out of courses and omitted from lists.
There is also the question of the circumstances of these writers' lives. As Woolf says in A Room of One's Own, "Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. . .these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."
As Woolf well knew, the houses we live in are often run by women and contain children who must be raised, fed, played with and cared for. Women have, or had in the past, to contend with myriad domestic interruptions to their writing careers. Somerville and Ross took to hiding in a cupboard to evade their hostess duties and give themselves time to write. Mary Lavin wrote her short stories at the kitchen table or in the National Library with her daughter Caroline doing her homework beside her.
Whether because of domestic duties or for some other reason, several Irish women worthy of consideration have written only one or two books. These may be valuable, but because their authors lack a consistent of body of work, publishers lose interest in them, the books go out of print and are forgotten. To mention a few works by women writers which I believe are saying important things, not only about women but about Ireland, and which are currently out of print: A Wreath Upon the Dead (Briege Duffaud); To Stay Alive (Linda Anderson); Titanic Town (Mary Costello); Give Them Stones (Mary Beckett); No Mate for the Magpie (Frances Molloy); Bridie Steen (Anne Crone); Callaghan and The Troubled House (Rosamond Jacob); The Maiden Dinosaur (Janet McNeill). There are many more.
If a novel is out of print, it cannot be taught, since students cannot be asked to study a text that is unavailable in the bookshops. This is another reason why women's writing gets lost easily. It is only by writing and talking and learning about books that they survive.
What the Irish Times list proved is that the battle to win appreciation for Irish women's writing is far from over.