Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction

Mothers and Daughters in Conflict in the Motherland, Edna O'Brien's The Light of Evening

“…They usually portray traditional Irish families as dysfunctional, as sites of patriarchal oppression for many of their members -mainly women-but they also deal with women's struggle over the last century to gain a place of their own within Irish society and outside it. Besides, after the mid-twentieth century, literary and research works on Irish emigration began to focus on the female experience of migration, probably because of the increasing number of Irish women who decided to start a new life abroad (McWilliams, 2013).Therefore, the image of the female migrant is cleverly used by O'Brien not only to explore the misfortunes and dangers young Irish women were exposed to in a foreign country by the early and mid-20th century, but also to portray conflictive mother-daughter relationships along her work, which resemble O'Brien's tense relationship with her own homeland, as well as with her own mother. "Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience", claims Edward Said .…”

The Poetics of Migration in Contemporary Irish Poetry

“…38 Ellen McWilliams, in her comprehensive 2013 book Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction, goes a great distance towards redressing the imbalance in critical discourse of that genre. 39 Tina O'Toole's article 'Cé Leis Tú? Queering Irish Migrant Literature' opens another window onto the diversity of migration experience which has historically, as well as critically, been interpreted and represented as a male heterosexual endeavour.…”