Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities by Ellen McWilliams (review)

Reviewed by: Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities by Ellen McWilliams Julieann Veronica Ulin (bio) IRISHNESS IN NORTH AMERICAN WOMEN'S WRITING: TRANSATLANTIC AFFINITIES, by Ellen McWilliams. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 185 pp. $55.00 cloth, $39.99 ebook. In the "Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus cuts off a conversation with Leopold Bloom about Ireland's demands upon him with the curt remark, "We can't change the country. Let us change the subject."1 Ellen McWilliams's Irishness in North American Women's Writing: Transatlantic Affinities uses this moment to open her analysis of how the six writers that form the core of her study change the subject from what Enda Delaney calls the cultural dominance of the "island story."2 Endorsing a "more generous taxonomy of Irish women's writing" that includes diaspora writers (165), McWilliams focuses the first half of the book on Irish American authors (Mary McCarthy, Maeve Brennan, and Alice McDermott) and the second half on Irish Canadian authors (Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Emma Donoghue). Her exploration of the Irish literary and cultural inheritances these authors navigate considers how they offer alternatives to narratives of either enclosure or celebrated relocation as they reimagine the nation that so exhausts Stephen. As McWilliams's opening suggests, her analysis throughout the book is attuned to the ways in which Joyce's influence is felt by those who have left Ireland. Daniel J. Casey and Robert E. Rhodes write in the introduction to Modern Irish-American Fiction: A Reader that "Irish-American fiction has yet to produce a James Joyce," indicating how the Irish literary tradition follows its diaspora writers.3 While the [End Page 208] focus here is on North American women writers, Joyceans may find McWilliams's brief discussions of John O'Hara's "The Assistant" and Brian Moore's The Luck of Ginger Coffey to be of interest in addition to the considerable attention paid to Joycean echoes, revisions, and rejections in her focal authors.4 In her chapter on Mary McCarthy as one of the Irish American canon's "most vibrantly dissenting voices," McWilliams redresses the critical fascination with McCarthy's personal feuds and scandals in favor of exploring her influence by and on other writers (32). Her novel The Groves of Academe focuses on a Joyce scholar and offers "nods and glances at the Irish literary canon" (38).5 Joyce's influence on midcentury writers is also evident in McWilliams's chapter on Brennan, particularly in her analysis of Brennan's short stories featuring Irish domestic servants in the Herbert's Retreat enclave in New York, "The Joker" and "The Bride" (1953).6 McWilliams considers Brennan's "The Long-Winded Lady" columns as a portrait of New York when it was a city on the verge of destruction in the 1950s and 1960s by "the ogre called Office Space that stalks the city and will not be appeased" (74).7 While columns such as Brennan's "The Last Days of New York" share none of the confidence contained in Joyce's suggestion that Dublin could be rebuilt from his writing,8 McWilliams links their commitment to describing the city as she continues the recent work of Brennan scholars in reevaluating her columns as serious meditations on urban space and usage. In McDermott's work, McWilliams traces the intergenerational alienation of the "second edition" Irish Americans as well as the effect of more local dislocations, from the boroughs of New York City to the suburbs of Long Island (101). McDermott's early deliberate sabotage of her mother's Irish soda-bread recipe carries forward to her "vague impulse to refuse" the expectations thrust upon her by inherited traditions.9 This extends to her attitude toward the potentially "overwhelming influence" of Joyce: "[I]f you are going to find your own voice and subject matter, you just have to say—and I think he would smile at my phraseology—'Fuck Joyce.'"10 McWilliams takes McDermott at her word here, linking the presence of the gothic and the uncanny in McDermott's work to the influence of the Brontës, though the ghostly in Joyce (or Irish literature more generally) might have...

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