Clodagh Finn: An invite to rediscover the female writers of Kerry

Irish Examiner

7 days ago

It is not as if the creative powerhouse that was Siobhán Ní Shúilleabháin was unappreciated in her day. No less a figure than playwright John B Keane once referred to her as 'the best dramatist writing in Ireland', and she won a slew of awards for her work as a short story writer, novelist, scriptwriter and playwright.
She was also an Olympian; her radio drama Arís featured in the literature category at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952. (Here's a fascinating aside: seven of the 19 participants in that one-time Olympian field were Irish, but that's a rabbit hole for another day).
It's enough to mine some of the rich material — all new to me — about this gifted artist that is coming to renewed and long overdue attention thanks to a new exhibition, Kerry Women in Literature, which opened at Kerry Writers' Museum in Listowel on Wednesday.
Siobhán Ní Shúilleabháin wrote in Irish. Why would she write in anything else, she once asked. As a woman born in Ballyferriter, Co Kerry, it was her first language and one that was incredibly rich in vocabulary. What a shame that the flow and cadence of her words, so often-praised in her work, is not better known today.
It would be wonderful to see a new production of her modern, funny and prescient play Madge agus Martha (1976), first staged at the Taibhdhearc in Galway in 1976.
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Set in the year 3000AD, it tells the story of 'two very liberated young women' who are preparing to have a baby without a man. The robot, the test-tube baby and the nurse are all lined up when the unthinkable happens. Madge reads a banned book — one that doesn't contain an account of the evils of men as all other books do — and she falls in love with a man.
And so the stage is set for a wonderful romp through the charged territory of jealousy, relationships, accepted norms, science and technology — and much more. How is it that I had never heard of it, or indeed, Cití, also penned by Ní Shúilleabháin which was staged the year before? That play tells the story of a woman who has blazing rows with her husband after she decides she no longer wants to play the role of a patient, long-suffering wife.
There is so much more to say about this woman, mother-of-six, full-time writer and wife to Patrick Leo Henry, professor of old and medieval English at NUI Galway, where the family lived for many years.
But she is just one of the 13 women whose voices, stories and lived experiences are being celebrated at Kerry Writers' Museum, aka the Seanchaí Centre, in an exhibition funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport & Media.
The museum's executive director, Cara Trant, and theatre historian and archivist Dr Fiona Brennan are talking about some of those women who have, at last, been returned to the spotlight.
Listening to them talk conjures up an image of the pair as torchbearers in a dark, dusty library casting a light on the long rows of shelves of women's writing which have been cast aside in an act of malign amnesia.
Fiona Brennan talks about being stalked by some of those stories — a feeling familiar to this column — and being compelled to seek out the spirits of these forgotten writers who made such an important contribution to Ireland's literary landscape.
The phenomenon of forgetting or neglecting women writers is an international one — and alas one with a long history.
It goes back to the beginning of literature itself but at the opening of Kerry Women in Literature, one of the first events of Listowel's Literary Festival, Fiona Brennan recalled English writer Sarah Fyge Egerton. When she was just 14, she wrote The Female Advocate (1686), a spirited defence of women against charges that the female sex was evil.
In response, her father banished her from her home and she was subsequently regarded as the 'she-devil incarnate'.
'While none of our writers cast such wrath in print, it is impossible to ignore the fact that like Egerton, for the most part, women in this exhibition were writing in a male-dominated society,' Brennan says.
Both she and Cara Trant pay tribute to their determination, sense of self and passion for their art and words which arrived into the world in a breathtaking range of literary forms: poetry, drama, fiction, historical and academic writing, memoir, biography, history, religion, politics, children's fiction and journalism.
Two of the women whose spirits prompted Fiona Brennan to research their lives and work are featured here; Pauline Maguire, civil servant and dramatist, and Máirín Cregan, nationalist and children's author. In her native Killorglin, Máirín Cregan is also celebrated with a vibrant mural by artist Ominous Omin.
It is a hopeful sign that times are changing and we can, at last, commemorate the women as well as the men who shaped our literary heritage.
Female writers in focus: Alice Curtayne, Sonja Broderick, Máirín Cregan, Bertha Beatty, Peig Sayers, Siobháin Ní Shúilleabháin and Cecile O'Rahilly.
Strap in now for a rapid-fire tour of an exhibition that casts off the wilful forgetfulness of centuries.
Some of the women are well-known, such as those representing the Irish oral tradition, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and Blasket Islander Peig Sayers. (It is good to see the latter in a new light rather than as the scourge of a generation of Leaving Cert students. Mind you, as one of those students, I confess to being slow to adjust, but it may happen).
The majority of those featured have fallen below the radar. How many of us, for instance, could say anything about Mary Downing or Anne Margaret Rowan, two writers on either side of the political divide?
Downing from Kilgarvan wrote under the pen name Christabel, and was a dedicated nationalist whose poetry was published by Charles Gavan Duffy, while Rowan was a journalist, novelist and committed Unionist from Tralee.
Fellow Tralee woman, writer and journalist Alice Curtayne, and Listowel Celtic scholar Cecile O'Rahilly are here too; two women with international reputations who are now getting more recognition at home.
Fiona Brennan offers this summary of Bertha Beatty and Maureen Beasley: 'They excelled in memoir and storytelling; their contributions are vital to the social and cultural history of Irish communities.'
The formidable Sr Margaret Cusack, aka the Nun of Kenmare, is honoured too, along with the late poet Sonja Broderick who represents 21st-century literature in Kerry.
Damian Daly's oil painting on canvas is inspired by the work of the late Listowel poet Sonja Broderick.
Six of the women's work has been interpreted by artists (Damian Daly, Aidan O'Leary, Myfanwy Frost-Jones, Roisín McGuigan and Ciara Tuite) and the exhibition was curated by Louise Lynch.
That list gives some insight into what goes into a project of this kind, but as the museum's executive director Cara Trant says: 'Kerry Women in Literature is not only an artistic and cultural milestone — it is an invitation to rediscover the women of Kerry who wrote, resisted, imagined, and recorded the world around them.'
Now there's an invite worth taking up.