It's Not Just About Irish Women

Yes I know my PhD analyzes Irishwomen's representation of Continental Europe from the Act of Union of 1800 through contemporary Ireland, but it simply isn't all about the Irish women.    You might be wondering what I'm on about, but let me explain by way of an example.  These past two weeks I've set down the works of the two writers whose works form the subject of my third chapter and have spent most of my time reading histories of nineteenth-century France, histories of banking, and Honoré de Balzac.



My supervisor, Sinead, suggested to me about two weeks ago that, in conjunction with Somerville and Ross, I should pick up George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, an 1886 novel that focuses on the life of the Protestant Ascendancy during the Land Wars.  If you have the time, I cannot recommend it highly enough; Moore's wit is unbelievable.  Moore, like Edith Somerville, spent several years in Paris, at first, studying to be a painter and then interacting with the literary and artistic avant-garde of fin-de-siecle Paris, including Zola, Manet, and Monet.  So here's the point of departure, Moore is often characterised as the first, if not the only, realist in the French tradition of Zola and Balzac in Irish literature; however, after reading so many of Somerville and Ross's works, I believe they too express modes of French realism.

So what next?  Well, Balzac.  I'm about half-way through his Grand Illusions and have been told his Pere Goriot might provide some useful context.  But reading Balzac isn't quite enough.  It becomes a bit of falling down a rabbit hole.  Since Balzac alone isn't enough, I've had to spend time reading studies of Balzac, including Georg Lukacs's European Realism, Mikhail Bakhtin's Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, and, of course, Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel.  All of this provides the theoretical support for arguments involving modes of realism in Somerville and Ross.

But I've also been reading Hobsbawm's The Age of Capital, Price's Economic History of Modern France, Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project and The Writer of Modern Life.  These provide more of an historical understanding of the France of Balzac, Zola, Moore, and Sommerville and Ross.  Benjamin is interesting, especially because his writings largely focus on the life and writings of Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry describes the emergence of modernity in Paris.  Benjamin sees this as an economic and industrial phenomenon.  Now, underlying Benjamin's economic arguments are Engels's writings on the division of labour and the development of modern industrial-based capitalism.

Like I said, it's not all about nineteenth-century Irish women writers.