Self-Contradiction in a Small Place: Anne Devlin’s “Other at the Edge of Life”

Abstract

Northern Irish dramatist Anne Devlin (1951-) was born in Belfast and, like her compatriot Medbh McGuckian, came of age with the onset of the Troubles. These women writers’ lives are indelibly bound up with their political history, and their work has occupied an important place in the cultural life of the North since the early 1980s. For Devlin that link is profound. As a former member of parliament for the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), her father, Paddy Devlin, was a well-known political figure in Belfast.1 Devlin grew up surrounded by the state politics that occupy a central place in her work. Like several of her characters, she left Belfast eventually to take up residence in London; and, unsurprisingly, escape, expatriation, and exile are key themes for her. Indeed, all of her original writing—a collection of short stories (The Way Paver, two of which were adapted by her as films), three theatrical plays (Ourselves Alone, After Easter, and Heartlanders, cowritten with Stephen Bill and David Edgar), and the original screenplay (The Long March)—is political, historical, and centers on female characters.2 Titles of major dramas give away their political orientations: Ourselves Alone is a translation of “Sinn Féin” (usually “We, Ourselves”), the Republican Party committed to Irish freedom, North and South, and reunification of the island.