A “new irish woman” emerges: Subverting femininity in maeve kelly’s A life of her own

Abstract

Women in Irish fiction have been largely the creation of male writers, and the embodiment of religious virtues such as purity and passivity, conventionally regarded as “feminine.” Not only the Roman Catholic Church but also the State progressively contributed to the social construct of Irish womanhood as inferior and, above all, domestic. From the 1960s onwards many women writers have tried relentlessly to reimage women in their fiction. Feminist activist Maeve Kelly is an outstanding example of such writers whose work remains virtually unexplored. Very often Kelly’s protagonists are women in their conventional roles as wives and mothers who struggle for happiness and independence. This essay focuses on her collected stories A Life of Her Own (1976), and particularly on her short story “The vain woman,” in which Kelly presents us with a “new Irish woman” who is no longer the personification of the Virgin Mary, and who actively rebels against her environment.