Deirdre Madden: New critical perspectives

By Manchester University Press

The Irish writer, Deirdre Madden, has written key novels about the Northern Irish Troubles and about contemporary Ireland. In these works, she weighs up the aftermath of violence and the impact of the shift to a more open but materialist society in the country overall. Memory, trauma, and the abiding but elusive links between the past and the present are central concerns of her fiction. This pioneering set of essays by leading experts in Irish Studies explores the many dimensions of her novels from a wide variety of perspectives. Madden’s skill at interweaving novels of ideas with artist novels that draw out the complex inner predicaments of her characters is highlighted. States of dislocation are concentrated on in her texts, but also the quest for a home in the world and a lasting set of values that allows for personal integrity and authenticity. These multifaceted explorations bear out the compelling and enduring aspects of Madden’s highly regarded novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526118943

Book preview

Deirdre Madden

Deirdre Madden

New critical perspectives

Edited by

Anne Fogarty and

Marisol Morales-Ladrón

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 1892 9 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover credit: Anne Yeats, Autumnal Fruits (1968), Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery (Reg. No. 1184); © Estate of Anne Yeats, DACS London/IVARO Dublin, 2022

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Contents

List of contributors

Preface: Deirdre Madden: a jagged symmetry

Frank McGuinness

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Part I Memory, trauma, and the Troubles

1 ‘Images … at the absolute edge of memory’: memory and temporality in Hidden Symptoms , One by One in the Darkness , and Time Present and Time Past

Stefanie Lehner

2 ‘The horror of little details’: remembering the Troubles in Hidden Symptoms and One by One in the Darkness

Elizabeth Chase

3 Journeying through loss: transcendence and healing in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms

Catriona Clutterbuck

4 Class and multiplicity in One by One in the Darkness

Brian Cliff

Part II Art and objects

5 Objects in Deirdre Madden’s artist novels

Sylvie Mikowski

6 Ageing and identity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity

Heather Ingman

7 Sensing one’s way forward: psychological aspects of creativity in Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity

Hedwig Schwall

8 ‘What can we do, what does art do?’: ethics and aesthetics in Deirdre Madden’s Hidden Symptoms , One by One in the Darkness , and Molly Fox’s Birthday

Teresa Casal

9 Looking at animals and objects in Deirdre Madden’s children’s books and some adult fiction

Julie Anne Stevens

Part III Home and place

10 Nothing is Black : the early Celtic Tiger and Europe

Jerry White

11 Imaginaries of home in Deirdre Madden’s fiction

Elke D’hoker

12 The architectural uncanny: family secrets and the Gothic in The Birds of the Innocent Wood and Remembering Light and Stone

Anne Fogarty

13 Living lives: Deirdre Madden’s Authenticity , Molly Fox’s Birthday , Time Present and Time Past , and the Irish Celtic Tiger novel

Derek Hand

14 In conversation with Deirdre Madden

Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Bibliography

Index

Contributors

Teresa Casal is Assistant Professor in English at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, Portugal, and a researcher in Irish Studies and Health Humanities at the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES). Her research interests include contemporary Irish fiction and memoir, as well as illness and grief narratives and their uses in the training of healthcare professionals. She has published articles in both fields and co-edited Beyond Diagnosis: Relating Person to Patient, Patient to Person (Inter-disciplinary Press, 2014), the bilingual volume Revisitar o Mito/Myths Revisited (Húmus, 2015), and the literary anthology on illness and healthcare, Contar (com) a Medicina (Caleidoscópio, 2016).

Elizabeth Chase is Senior Associate Director, Academic Assessment, at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. Prior to joining Emerson, she served as Assistant Dean of General Education and Assistant Professor of English at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, where she taught courses on commemoration in contemporary Irish literature and on the writings of post-Celtic Tiger immigrants into Ireland. She was also previously the Program Director for Irish Studies and Head of Collections, Assessment, and User Engagement in the MacPhaidin Library, also at Stonehill College. She has published in both library science and literary journals, including works on teaching with archival materials and Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy.

Brian Cliff is a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where he was a Lecturer and Assistant Professor from 2007 to 2019. His publications include the Edgar Award-nominated Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2020), co-edited with Elizabeth Mannion; Irish Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2018); Synge and Edwardian Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-edited with Nicholas Grene; and a reprint of Emma Donoghue’s Hood (HarperPerennial, 2011), co-edited with Emilie Pine. His most recent article, ‘At Home in Irish Crime Fiction’, appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, 39.1 (2021), a special issue devoted to domestic noir. He co-organised ‘Irish Crime Fiction: A Festival’ in November 2013, and is currently working on a monograph about community and contemporary Irish writing.

Catriona Clutterbuck lectures in the School of English, Drama, Film, and Creative Writing at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, specialising in Irish literature. Her research is focused on contemporary Irish poetry, with broader interests in gender, creativity, faith concepts, the poetics of mourning, and Irish critical cultures. Recent essays include work on Catholicism in modern Irish women’s poetry (in A History of Irish Women’s Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 2021) and on Heaney and MacNeice (in Seamus Heaney in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2021). Her first poetry collection, The Magpie and the Child, was published by Wake Forest University Press in 2021.

Elke D’hoker is Professor of English Literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she is also director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies. She has published widely in the field of modern and contemporary British and Irish fiction, with special emphasis on the short story, women’s writing, and narrative theory. Her most recent publications are Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (Palgrave, 2016) and Ethel Colburn Mayne: Selected Stories (Edward Everett Root, 2021). She is also co-editor of several essay collections, including Mary Lavin (Irish Academic Press, 2013), The Irish Short Story (Peter Lang, 2015), The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and Sarah Hall: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2021). D’hoker is Vice-President of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) and a member of the editorial board of Review of Irish Studies in Europe (RISE).

Anne Fogarty is Professor of James Joyce Studies at University College Dublin, Ireland, and co-editor with Luca Crispi of the Dublin James Joyce Journal. She is co-editor with Timothy Martin of Joyce on the Threshold (University Press of Florida, 2005), with Morris Beja of Bloomsday 100: Essays on ‘Ulysses’ (University Press of Florida, 2009), with Éilís Ni Dhuibhne and Éibhear Walshe of Imagination in the Classroom: Teaching and Learning Creative Writing in Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2013), and with Fran O’Rourke of Voices on Joyce (University College Dublin Press, 2015). She has published widely on aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish writing with a particular focus on women authors. Her edition of Dubliners for Penguin is forthcoming in 2022.

Derek Hand is a Professor and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Dublin City University, Ireland. The Liffey Press published his book John Banville: Exploring Fictions in 2002. He edited a special edition of the Irish University Review on John Banville in 2006. He has lectured on Irish writing in the United States, Portugal, Norway, Singapore, Brazil, Italy, Sweden, Malaysia, and France. He was awarded an Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Government of Ireland Research Fellowship for 2008–9. His A History of the Irish Novel: 1665 to the Present was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011 and is now available in paperback. He is also the co-editor of a collection of essays on John McGahern, entitled Essays on John McGahern: Assessing a Literary Legacy, published by Cork University Press in 2019.

Heather Ingman is Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Her most recent publications include Elizabeth Bowen (Edward Everett Root, 2021), Strangers to Themselves: Ageing in Irish Writing (Palgrave, 2018), Irish Women’s Fiction from Edgeworth to Enright (Irish Academic Press, 2013), A History of the Irish Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender (Ashgate, 2007). She is co-editor, with Clíona Ó Gallchoir, of A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Stefanie Lehner is Senior Lecturer in Irish Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice (QUB). Her research interests are in contemporary Irish and Scottish literature as well as post-conflict cultures. Her current research explores the role of the arts, specifically performance, in conflict transformation processes, with a focus on the Northern Irish context. She is author of Subaltern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and her work has been published in Contemporary Theatre Review, Irish Review, Irish Studies Review, Irish University Review, and Nordic Irish Studies. She is working on the Partnership for Conflict, Crime, and Security Research/Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project, ‘Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation’.

Frank McGuinness was born in Buncrana, County Donegal, Ireland. A renowned playwright, he has written numerous celebrated plays, including The Factory Girls, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching towards the Somme, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, Dolly West’s Kitchen, and The Hanging Gardens. He has also translated the plays of Racine, Sophocles, Ibsen, Lorca, and Strindberg to critical acclaim. His awards include the London Evening Standard Award for most promising playwright for Observe the Sons of Ulster in 1985, and a Tony Award for his 1997 adaptation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. He has published four volumes of poetry, two novels, Arimathea (Brandon, 2013) and The Woodcutter and His Family (Brandon, 2017), and a collection of short stories, Paprika (Brandon, 2018). He wrote the screenplay for Pat O’Connor’s 1998 film version of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa. He held the first professorship of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. A recent play, The Visiting Hour, was livestreamed from the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 2021.

Sylvie Mikowski is a Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France. Her main fields of interest are Irish fiction and popular culture. She has published Le Roman irlandais contemporain (Presses universitaires de Caen, 2004), edited Aspects of the Irish Book from the 17th Century to Today (Revue Lisa, III.1, 2005), History and Memory in France and Ireland (Editions et presses universitaires de Reims, 2010), and Ireland and Popular Culture (Peter Lang, 2014), and co-edited Ireland: Zones and Margins (Études Irlandaises, 2004), The Book in Ireland (Cambridge Scholars, 2007), Écrivaines Irlandaises:Irish Women Writers, The Circulation of Popular Culture between Ireland and the United States (Presses universitaires de Caen, 2016), and Ireland: Spectres and Chimeras (Imaginaires 23, 2021). She has also published papers and book chapters on various contemporary Irish writers, especially on John McGahern, Roddy Doyle, Colum McCann, and Sebastian Barry. She served as editor of the literary section of Études Irlandaises, is now on the editorial board of Review of Irish Studies in Europe, and is the current chair of SOFEIR, the French Society of Irish Studies.

Marisol Morales-Ladrón is Full Professor of English and Irish Literature at the University of Alcalá, Spain. She holds degrees in English, Spanish, and Psychology, and her research focuses on contemporary Irish literature, gender studies, and cultural memory. Her publications include the books Breve introducción a la literatura comparada (Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 1999) and Las poéticas de James Joyce y Luis Martín-Santos (Peter Lang, 2005). She has edited the books Postcolonial and Gender Perspectives in Irish Studies (Netbiblo, 2007) and Family and Dysfunction in Contemporary Irish Narrative and Film (Peter Lang, 2016), and has co-edited Glocal Ireland: Current Perspectives on Literature and the Visual Arts (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), as well as two other studies on feminist criticism. She has published articles on a variety of English and Irish authors, which have appeared in peer-reviewed journals. At present, she is the General Editor of the journal Estudios Irlandeses and serves her university as Vice-President for Quality Management. Previously she was Vice-President for Academic and Student Affairs, Head of Department, Director of Academic Affairs, Chair of the Spanish Association for Irish Studies (AEDEI), and executive member of the boards of several national and international associations, including the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures (IASIL).

Hedwig Schwall is Project Director of EFACIS and was Director of the Leuven Centre for Irish Studies (2010–21). She has co-edited Psychology and the Classics: A Dialogue of Disciplines (de Gruyter, 2018) and edited Boundaries, Passages, Transitions (Irish Studies in Europe), the special issue of Review of Irish Studies in Europe on ‘Irish Textiles: (t)issues in communities and their representation in art and literature’. In 2019 she edited The Danger and the Glory (Arlen House, 2019), an anthology of sixty contributions by Irish fiction writers about the art of writing (partly available on https://kaleidoscope.efacis.eu/), followed by a second instalment About Europe in Ireland | Kaleidoscope II (efacis.eu); in 2020 she co-edited a special issue of the Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies on John Banville (www.revistas.usp.br/abei/issue/view/11819). After having headed literary translation projects on Yeats and Banville, she is currently completing one (2021–22) on Anne Enright (https://enright.efacis.eu/). In her research, she focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to literature and art in Europe, using psychoanalytic methods. She is now preparing a book on mother figures in contemporary Irish fiction.

Julie Anne Stevens is Assistant Professor in the School of English, Dublin City University, Ireland. She served as the university’s Director for the Centre for Children’s Literature and Culture from 2009 to 2017. She currently is a team member of the Irish Women’s Writing (1880–1920) Network and one of the editors for English Studies’ double issue on Irish Women’s Networks and Collaborations (1880–1940), to be published in 2022 and 2023. She co-edited with Helen Conrad O’Brian The Ghost Story from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (Four Courts, 2010). Her two monographs on Somerville and Ross, The Irish Scene in Somerville and Ross (Irish Academic Press, 2007) and Two Irish Girls in Bohemia: The Drawings and Writings of E. Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross (Somerville Press, 2017), have established her as an important contributor on late nineteenth-century Irish women’s writing.

Jerry White is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and the former Editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. He is the author of The Radio Eye: Cinema in the North Atlantic, 1958–1988 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009; paperback, 2018), around half of which is about the Gaeltacht. He is also the author of Revisioning Europe: The Films of John Berger and Alain Tanner (University of Calgary Press, 2011), Two Bicycles: The Work of Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013), and Stan Brakhage in Rolling Stock: 1980–1990 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018). He has also edited two anthologies on Canadian cinema. Recent articles have appeared in Aboriginal Policy Studies, the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and New Hibernia Review.

Preface

Deirdre Madden: a jagged symmetry

Frank McGuinness

She knows her stuff, Deirdre Madden. What magnificent, intricate stuff her novels consist of, strong fabrics she cuts into unique shape, leaving a marked imprint on the style of the times.

From her first novel, Hidden Symptoms, Madden sounded an original voice in contemporary Irish fiction. The streets of uncivil war Belfast were paved with secrets, dire and devastating, where the dead constantly threaten to rise and confound the living, heads and hearts breaking under the weight of lies told and love abandoned. Robert, Kelly, and Theresa – Madden’s perfect configuration is so often the triangle – cross each other’s paths and collide precisely, the wreckage left behind is all that needs to be known to identify exactly who they are; what, in their intimacy, they were; and what they will eventually measure up to becoming.

That control of her art persists in Nothing is Black. The Northern setting remains: the backdrop is the wilds of Donegal, where three women seek shelter. They find their habitat in that loneliest of counties, each separately in pursuit of what might aid and abet them in the perilous business of making sense of their lives. More than capable professionally, a success indeed at their different careers, they summon the strength to make ruthless decisions that will allow them to dictate how they permit life to shape their destinies. Some strange, scrupulous sympathy unites them. They realise they are alone and that they are all the stronger for being so. Here are the makings of a new woman, Irish, European, surviving trauma, surviving all – surviving, surviving.

Authenticity is one of the mighty books of the last twenty years in the English language. Madden’s connections with Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys are, rightly or wrongly, often stressed, but the closest contact operating here is Jane Austen, especially Emma, Madden’s creative model surely, from whom she learns how to intensify passion through the vigorous concentration on the telling detail that links every individual with the whole of society. The sheer scale of the writing illuminates as it enlarges our familiarity with the meticulously delineated characters, their obsessions and sorrows, their ambiguities and their ambitions. Steeped in art history, a learning carried lightly throughout her work, generous with relevant information though when necessary and using it to comically caustic ends, Deirdre Madden’s knowledge of her subject frees her to engage in the most complex games of shifting time and place. She plays with plot as adroitly as if it were a colour at the command of fingers and thumb, knowing how to coax it to where she wants it to land, taking the breath out of you, dazzling you with her effects. Gaze on the following image of a brooch, a birthday present from a lover:

It was a striking and unusual combination of materials – slate, ­copper, mother-of-pearl – that worked together particularly well. The iridescence of the fragment of shell, its rainbow colours like oil on water, was enhanced by the slate, blue-grey and dull, like a winter sky. (Madden 2002: 220–1)

In its jagged symmetry, this passage works as a metaphor for Madden’s art itself.

Remember, too, what links all of Madden’s fiction: her understanding of human failure, the recognition of how near, how far away happiness resides, how we break as we make promises, how we touch and are taken away by – what? Who can say? Deirdre Madden can. I spoke of the fabric that makes up her novels. Magnificent, intricate stuff, certainly, but look closely, look at the tears and the things that are torn and know, as she knows, that some things can never be repaired. There are many reasons to revere and love her work. That is the greatest one.

Acknowledgements

In the long process of preparing this book, many people have assisted us. Anne Fogarty would like to thank her colleagues at University College Dublin, John Brannigan, Emilie Pine, Danielle Clarke, James Ryan, Catriona Clutterbuck, Lucy Collins, Anthony Roche, Luca Crispi, Eamonn Jordan, Fionnuala Dillane, Jane Grogan, Katherine Fama, Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, Maria Stuart, Naomi McAreavey, Cormac O’Brien, P. J. Mathews, Paul Perry, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, and Margaret Kelleher, for their sustaining friendship and advice, and Marisol Morales-Ladrón would like to acknowledge the support and friendship of her colleagues at the University of Alcalá, AEDEI and ABEI, Fernando Galván, Alberto Lázaro, Pilar Villar, Asier Altuna, Auxiliadora Pérez, Teresa Caneda, José Carregal, Luz Mar González, Mariana Bolfarine, Munira Mutran, Laura Izarra, and Juan F. Elices.

Our heartfelt gratitude to our contributors for their enthusiasm, critical insights, hard work, and unflagging patience and to Deirdre Madden for her support and wise counsel over many years. We are grateful to the Anne Yeats Estate and the Dublin City Gallery: The Hugh Lane for the permission to reproduce Anne Yeats’s Autumnal Fruits (1968). Special thanks to Matthew Frost and to Paul Clarke at Manchester University Press for their work in bringing this volume to fruition and Lillian Woodall and Jen Mellor for their professional oversight of the production of the collection.

Introduction

Anne Fogarty and Marisol Morales-Ladrón

Deirdre Madden is one of the most distinguished and sophisticated novelists of her generation. Since she published her first novel, Hidden Symptoms, in 1986, her work has consistently been held in high esteem by critics and fellow artists alike, gained her a loyal and discerning readership, and garnered many prizes. Madden was born in 1960, in Toomebridge, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, studied English at Trinity College Dublin, and subsequently completed an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She spent many years living in various European countries, including France, Italy, and Switzerland, and has since 1994 been a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, where she was made Fellow in 2021.

She made a precocious debut, publishing her first short story, ‘God and Mammon’, in the influential ‘New Irish Writing’ pages curated by David Marcus in the Irish Press on 23 June 1979.¹ Peculiarly, as Irish writers often diversify across several genres, she has devoted herself solely to the practice of the novel. The eight novels – Hidden Symptoms, The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Remembering Light and Stone, Nothing is Black, One by One in the Darkness, Authenticity, Molly Fox’s Birthday, and Time Present and Time Past – that she has published with Faber & Faber collectively constitute a multi-layered, resonant, and probing body of work. Hidden Symptoms won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1987, Remembering Light and Stone won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1989, and One by One and Molly Fox’s Birthday were both shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (previously the Orange Prize for Fiction) in 1997 and 2009, respectively.

Madden’s novels explicitly engage with the problems of existence in the contemporary world and consistently raise pressing and exacting philosophical questions about the meaning of life during the Troubles and peace process in Northern Ireland and in the recent decades of social change and upheaval in the South. Yet her works are never merely realist or topical. Far rather, they worry at the limits of representation, the contours of selfhood, and the nature of being. Additionally, the three children’s novels that she has composed, Snakes’ Elbows, Thanks for Telling Me, Emily, and Jasper and the Green Marvel, reveal her talent for creating playful and anarchic counter-worlds in which animals and humans swap places.

Taken up with aftermaths and transitions, her novels examine the effects of living with terrorist violence and sectarian division in Northern Ireland and the transformation from an insular, nationalist society to a more open, international, Europe-oriented – albeit materialist – culture in the South. They consistently render complex states of mind and give prominence to the torn inner conditions of her protagonists. Composed in a spare, precise style, her economic texts pointedly cross-pollinate aspects of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel with strategies that characterise the modernist novel. They carry forward the interest of novelists such as Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and George Eliot in material milieus and objects, the family, linearity, the links between character and fate, class conflict, and life-defining narrative arcs. But they also rework the concerns of modernist authors, such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, with states of consciousness, the body, moments of being, the nature of perception, fragmentation, unfinished trajectories, the problem of time, and self-reflexive musings on the meaning of art. Frequently, too, Madden adds to the tonal and intellectual complexity of her work by intertwining the political novel, the novel of ideas, existential fictions, and the Künstlerroman, or artist novel. Even though her texts delve into the plights of male figures as much as those of female ones, they regularly concentrate on pivotal women protagonists who are outsiders and contrarians and, in espousing bohemian rather than bourgeois values, are at odds with their families and communities.

The absence of women from the Irish literary canon and public discourse generally has proven a peculiarly stubborn reality. It remains a seemingly intractable phenomenon, despite the concerted efforts of feminist criticism over several decades to achieve recognition and equal status for women writers. Time and again, in recent years, it has been proven that patriarchy has a peculiar stranglehold on literary institutions in the country. The omission of women in key anthologies and studies has been persistently denounced by critics. The paucity of women in The New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, edited by Thomas Kinsella, published in 1985, and in the initial three volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, published in 1991, fomented much angry debate and inspired many initiatives to recover the work of female artists, including the publication of Volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology of Women’s Writing in 2002. However, the fact that The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, edited by Gerald Dawe, published in 2017, still accorded minimal space to female practitioners shows that the project of lastingly bringing about gender balance in the cultural sphere in Ireland remains unrealised. In 2017, the #WakingtheFeminists movement highlighted the degree to which female practitioners and performers were under-employed and sidelined in Irish theatre.² In the same year, Anne Enright, in a lecture given in her role as the first laureate of fiction, drew attention to gender bias in the reviewing culture of the country and demonstrated that many of the main newspapers, including the Irish Times, devoted more space to male-authored texts and preponderantly drew on male reviewers who were rarely tasked with commenting on works by women (Enright, 2019: 71–88). Despite the significance of her work and the purchase of its thematic concerns, Deirdre Madden’s novels have suffered in this cultural climate that obdurately promotes male artists and grants only tokenistic space to female ones. Moreover, the international reputation of her novels, especially in Europe and the United States, outstrips their standing in her home country. Additionally, it may be mooted that the longevity of her career has led to the eclipsing of her work and to its slipping in and out of the critical spotlight. The ‘cycles of forgetting’ that beset women’s writing generally impact particularly heavily on those who are mid-career.³ Madden’s fiction was regularly excerpted in several key anthologies in the 1990s, including Ireland’s Women: Writing Past and Present, edited by Katie Donovan, A. Norman Jeffares, and Brendan Kennelly; The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, edited by Dermot Bolger; and The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, edited by Colm Tóibín.⁴ Her work also featured in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing, Volume VI. Recent celebrated collections of women’s writing, however, have concentrated solely on the short story, thereby necessarily bypassing Madden who, although she has evinced her continuing interest in the mode in recently editing All Over Ireland: New Irish Short Stories, has exclusively published novels. Hence, she is perforce omitted from Sinéad Gleeson’s The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland, which has been hailed as a landmark publication rescuing women writers in Northern Ireland from decades of neglect. Notably, however, Linda Anderson and Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado, the editors of the 2017 volume Female Lines: New Writing from Northern Ireland, broke with their own criteria for inclusion by featuring an excerpt from Time Present and Time Past, thereby underscoring Madden’s importance and the esteem in which her work is held. Yet although the visibility of Madden’s oeuvre has increased in recent years, her work is still far from attaining the place it deserves given the consistent distinction of her output, the intricacy and subtlety of her novels and the searching philosophical inquiries that they instigate, and the steady and widespread critical attention accorded to her texts, which have been translated into many different languages and are regularly taught in universities around the world.

One reason why Madden’s writing has been overlooked is that it resists easy categorisation; she herself is wary of designations that she finds inadequate or lazily imprecise. It is difficult to align her within either an Irish or a female literary tradition, albeit compelling cross-connections with Jane Austen, John McGahern, Gustave Flaubert, John Banville, and Elizabeth Bowen are mooted in several of the essays gathered here, and reviewers have periodically suggested other kindred authors – Linda Grant, for example, positing links with Jean Rhys, and Eileen Battersby with Anita Brookner. While the social and psychological traumas caused by the Troubles in the North have consistently been the subject matter of her novels, even if sometimes only tangentially, the redemptive power of art and its central role in making sense of human experience are overriding concerns of her texts, set in diverse locations ranging from Dublin and Belfast to Donegal and from Umbria and the United States to Paris. The sculpted quality of her prose and the controlled introspection of her plots have at times gone unappreciated by a readership that demanded more innovative techniques and falsely equated Madden’s apparent attachment to what Geraldine Higgins dubbed a ‘naturalistic realism’ with a lack of formal experimentation (Higgins, 1999: 145).

Distinctively, Madden’s novels combine a meticulous attention to historical chronology, geographical setting, domestic interiors, and psychological verisimilitude with a quest for hard-won universal insights and states of transcendence that dissolve time and space and intricate existential reckonings with the nature of being. Her novels, moreover, move fluidly between past and present, Ireland and Europe. They eschew purely Irish settings and navigate the questions they pose about identity and the purpose of art through transnational frameworks. If, as Madden has memorably declared, the Troubles are almost always present in her writings, they are also regularly cross-connected with scenes set elsewhere, usually in Italy and France (Patterson, 2013). Her dislocated characters are suspended between home and abroad and examine the political and existential baggage of Irishness in the light of the alternatives suggested by other sites of cultural interaction. Above all, Madden’s resistance to experimentation is more assumed than actual, as several critics have underlined, including most notably Michael Parker and Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, who laud her sophistication and her recourse to metafictional strategies and postmodernist perspectives and techniques (Parker, 2000: 83; Kennedy-Andrews, 2003: 146).

Unsurprisingly, Madden’s novels that overtly deal with the Northern Irish Troubles, Hidden Symptoms, One by One in