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Deirdre F. Brady, "Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers' Club (1933-1958)" (Liverpool UP, 2021)
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
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Colleen English
Hello and welcome to New Books in Irish Studies, a podcast channel in the New Books Network. Colleen I'm Colleen English, one of the co hosts of this channel. Today I'm very excited to be talking with Dr. Deirdre Brady, Assistant professor at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. She has published widely on Irish writers groups of the mid 20th century, including the Women Writers Club and Irish Pen, and her work has featured in peer review, international journals, cultural magazines and in the Irish Times. She also writes creatively and her poetry is published by Arlen Press. Her most recent publications explore the interconnections between art and commerce and the global reach of influence of Irish writers of Irish women writers. In this interview we will be discussing her new book, Literary Coteries and the Irish Women Writers Club 1933-1958, published by Liverpool University Press in hardback in 2021 and more recently in paperback in 2024. This book is centered around the activities of the IR Writers Club, a 20th century women's only coterie that helped to establish a network of professional women writers. This fascinating and carefully researched study demonstrates how intertwined Irish writers were with wider global feminist networks and literary marketplaces. Deirdre Welcome. I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about the inspiration for this book which was a newspaper article in the Dublin Evening Mail. How did this article lead you to this book project?
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Well, firstly, Colleen, thank you for having me today. It's wonderful to be here and I'm delighted to be talking about my project. So it's sort of the genesis is that it started with a newspaper clip. As you mentioned, I was finishing my master's thesis on the works of Rosamund Jacob, the Irish writer and activist, when I came across this newspaper clip about the jubilee of the Women Writers Club. So it described the evening celebrations. During that evening, Jacob had won the literary prize, which they named the book of the year. But it also listed a lot of women writers which I had heard about and some which I hadn't heard about. Some were known internationally to quote the book. But what really struck me was the notion that this club had existed for over 25 years and yet no one knew much about it. And there was an exception, of course, which I didn't know at the time. But Professor Gerard Dimini from UCD had pinpointed this gap in the literature and the need for a study on the Women Writers Club. And as I went through my research, this was very encouraging for me because I felt that this was not just something that I noticed, but something that other more prominent scholars had noticed as well. But I put it aside for the time being. I was completing my thesis and then I was returning to my full time career in business. But it stayed with me. I was thinking about it quite a lot. And when the opportunity came for a PhD scholarship, I wrote a proposal, subsequently won it. It was at the University of Limerick. And I pivoted from marketing retail management to academia, aided by two wonderful supervisors, Dr. Catherine Lang and Dr. Koilini Vakan Mitchell. So you could say it was fortuitous that I found this. And I've spent many years in academia teaching and researching and presenting my material. So from the beginning I was working backwards, chronologically speaking, I was looking at the material on the women writers that were mentioned. I was sifting through their personal correspondences and papers, many of which are held in the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. But I was hoping to find something concrete, you know, maybe a memorandum or maybe a sort of series of reports or something similar. It was really like finding a needle in a haystack. I found bits of information, you know, some letters maybe or some sort of correspondence about the Women Writers Club meeting, but there was very little. So I started looking at digital newspaper archives and particularly the Irish Times, which was very accessible at the time. And over time, it constructed this history of what I think is a very fascinating club and the activities that they were involved in. So just to give a sense of the Writers Club, it was a very vibrant network of professional women writers. And you mentioned that a few minutes ago, Colleen. You know, that idea that it was for professional writers, and this is very important because it was one of the qualifications for membership as well. You know, they had to have published in some form, whether it was a book of poetry or a children's book or a novel. And one of the sort of striking things about the Women's Writers Club was it was made up of a diverse set of women writers who were writing across different genres. So their aim was to provide a support system at a time when it was very difficult to be a woman writer and even a writer itself, male or female, particularly after the introduction of the censorship act in 1929. And for women, it was a period when their voices were being implicitly censored. They were discouraged from entering the public sphere and were in many senses relegated to the home. And it became something that was then, as was seen in the legislation of the mid-30s. So they needed a support system which would not only provide some collegial support, but was strong enough, influential enough to agitate against censorship and on gender issues. So broadly speaking, I think their importance as a club stems from the need to tell the other half of the story. And I think that was my aim from the very beginning. And what I found is that women writers really had a central role in literary life of the period, and particularly those centred in the city centre, in Dublin city. So on the other hand, it was an era of great change. It was post independence in Ireland, the new Irish Free State was established and it was a relatively stable government, though maybe some might disagree with me on that. But there was new technologies emerging and this was very important, particularly in the publishing landscape. The paperback was introduced, book sales were fueled by mass consumerism, particularly in the larger markets of America and Britain. And all this new media like radio was getting great traction and attention from, from those involved in the creative industries. And this was a great opportunity for literary women to get a foothold in what was often a very male orientated industry. So, you know, that's maybe was the overall broad aim of the study and a broad aim of the Writers Club itself. But, you know, to kind of name a few names as such, you know, who was involved in it, you know, what was their significance? Well, many of the most influential women of the period who were active in national and in international movements included Hannishia Skeffington, well known as one of the most prominent feminists of the period. Rosamund Jacob, whom I mentioned earlier. Sibylli Brocke, who was very involved in the League of Nations, and a very prominent member of the Women writers club, Dorothy McCardle. All these women were active and anti imperialist peace movements and as I mentioned, the League of Nations, but there was others beside that. Maud gone MacBride and the Academic. Mary Hayden and Lorna Reynolds come up frequently in the correspondences and they brought with them a vast array of different networks. The national academic and international feminist movements. On the literary side, of course, which is also important, we had novelists like Kate O', Brien, she was president in 1950. So again, playing a very prominent role within the club itself, Maura Laverty, Elizabeth Bone was maybe on the fringes, but certainly she was one of the recipients of their literary prize. And I'll speak to that in a few moments. Children's writer Patricia lynch, who was very successful in the international realm. Playwrights Christine Longford and Theresa Deevey, poets like Blondis Salkeld, who was the founder of the club itself in 1933, and Poets Temple Lane, Winifred Letts. And I know I'm listing a lot of them, but, you know, I think these were very important to the story. Arctists were involved, mainly Jealous, who's sort of well known in artistic circles, and Lillian Davidson, who designed their logo. So they had an active cultural presence. The many had been involved in the earlier 20th century movements. And while there were a diverse group of individuals, they did share, or they seem to have shared the liberal European sensibility. They were very much in touch with what was going on in. In European intellectual circles. They considered themselves, I think, thought leaders of the period and they fought very hard for women's rights in the gender campaigns of the period as well. So they held. What did they do? They held meetings, maybe about eight monthly meetings a year. They held them in restaurants and hotels and clubs and cafes and all these public spaces within the Dublin city centre. They hosted annual banquets and held literary prizes and discussed literature. And at very much an intellectual level, not just in the public sphere, but in the private sphere as well. But I think from a collegial, supportive point of view, they were very active in reviewing each other's work in periodicals and in newspapers and, you know, really sort of standing up for women in the literary marketplace. So one of the things that I noticed as I went through the process was that Their connections, which is really important to this story as well. They had a very. They were closely connected to corridors of power, whether through family connections or friendships or maybe even political movements of the early 20th century. And they were absolute experts in getting media attention for their activities, which, of course, as a researcher, I'm very grateful for. So that sort of, I suppose, gives a sense of who they are, who was involved in it, maybe some of their broad aims.
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Colleen English
Thanks so much, Deirdre. Yeah, I think that gives us a really good sense of kind of their activities, the aims and the members. And of course, one of the really impressive things about your book is this complex literary network and social network that you sketch out here of the Irish women writers of the mid 20th century. So you include a lot of ephemera as well, like the letter from Leonard Saltgeld to Austin Clarke. And so it really seems like one of the main accomplishments and one of the main aims of your book is to create this kind of archive of Irish women writers, the Irish Women Writers Club. So what did your research process look like? I know you mentioned some of the holdings at the National Library, but how did you start to kind of unearth all of these fascinating ephemera and things?
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Yes, I love that idea of an archive, Colleen, But I think things like the. I suppose some of the material that I came across, like that letter from Blauna Salka to Austin Clark, really opened up new avenues for research and particularly around the topic of the Gayfield Press. And, you know, I'll speak about that maybe a little bit later, but as you know, for research, it's that chance find that makes it very interesting. In fact, it's almost an adrenaline rush for academics. It's how I think about it. So this was a double win because it not only provided evidence of their friendship and their literary circle, but it gave me a wealth of knowledge about the press itself because it was written on headed paper. There was an idea of their aims, even the type of press, the type of poets that they wanted represented in the press. And it gave a real clue to the nature of their publications. So I began to kind of think about, you know, moving outside of women's correspondences to look at men's literary papers, to look at newspapers, business correspondences, even government institutes, and try and construct a very broad story of the literary period. So ephemera, photos, letters, are very much part of this archival collection, because I think that they make real not just the events, but the people themselves. One of my favorite quotations is from Susan Sontag and she sums up the photo as, and I'll just quote her, a portrait chronicle of itself. A portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness. And I really love that quotation because I think it really sort of speaks to what I was doing in my research process. So there were many challenges, as there is with a lot of archival work. There was difficult decisions to be made as to what to include and what to exclude. What time period should I look at and how to categorize it as well. And again, part of the problem of archival retrieval is the lack of primary material. In my case, to start with, all I had at this point was when I first started was this newspaper clip and dearth of secondary material as well, at that time on writing groups in Ireland. So it developed very quickly into a very large project, took many years, and I was diving deep into private letters, committee reports if I could find them. Newspapers, invitations, even society pages, censorship lists. And I suppose that was one of my interesting finds, is to go along to see the initial journal where the banned books were written, photographs, of course, and government organizations. But some of the core material came from digital archives like the Irish Times. And so each new discovery really kind of shifted the focus of the project until the arc of the story started to take shape. So that was, I suppose, how it started. Another challenge, of course, was the diversity of writers in the club. It wasn't possible to look at every writer in great detail, or it wasn't possible to examine the whole corpus because that would have been too unyieldy. Unwieldy, sorry. And it really needed to be narrowed down. So. And trying to find a central ethos or philosophy, I started to look at the Literary Prize. And this was kind of interesting in itself because it was one of the first literary prizes awarded to women writers at the time. And from what I've gathered over the years, there was at least 15 over 25 year period. So I looked initially at the winning texts. Chronologically, it seemed much more logical to approach it from that point of view. But the longer I worked on it, the more it seemed that a thematic analysis was going to reap a much richer or clearer or even exciting story of the aims of the club. So in the chapter that I've written, chapter three, I categorized these under the themes of experimental literature, the broader nationalist histories and censorship. So over the existence of the club, the prize started eventually to resemble an important axis of analysis for understanding their value system.
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Colleen English
There.
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Colleen English
Yeah, that seems like a really good way to approach it, just focusing on the prizes rather than trying to, you know, extensively look at each author in the club. And if we could turn to chapter one. You kind of situate Dublin in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s as a cosmopolitan milieu that's comparable with European cultural centers like Paris, London and Berlin. Maybe. Could you describe the activities of the Writers Club in these decades and talk a little bit more about how they engage with the wider cultural debates around censorship and gender?
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Yes, certainly. Culturally, the capital city of Dublin, it was a hive of social activity. There was various literary, theatrical and artistic societies on the fringes of society, and I suppose we have to admit that this was within a particular milieu. They met in cafes. The Women Writers Club particularly met more frequently in the Country Store, which was based in 23St Stevens Green. Irish Pen, another very important prominent writing group of the time, met originally in Robert's Cafe and later in the offices of the Dublin opinion WB Yeats, and often referred to as his Academy of Letters. They met in the Abbey Theatre's Peel Cafe, and all of them held banquets at luxury hotels, the favorite being for the Women Writers Club in the New Hibernia and the Gresham Hotel, and they hosted Garden Parties at homes and congregated generally in city spaces close to museums and libraries and theaters and government buildings. So this great sense of loss of activity going on at the time, and you see this is recorded in the newspapers as well, we see, which are primarily an elite group. They're entertaining themselves in glamorous hotels, they're elegantly dressed, they're photographed by an enthusiastic media and you know, they're narrating the witty speeches, the anecdotes, the after dinner toasts. And what was kind of interesting for me as a researcher was that for most of the reports there was always an attendance list of who's who, who attended. And I think that for me was a rich source of material. One record in 1938, there was 80 members at the Women Writers Club banquet. But these were social events, they were carefully curated in my opinion. I think, however, they belie a more serious intent for the Women Writers Club. They were engaging in public discussions on the status of, status of women in Irish society. They were campaigning against the draft constitution campaign in 1937, which they felt was open to interpretation and could lead to regressive legislation against women. And they co opted. Then they joined with their international feminist groups such as the British Six Point Group, the Open Door Council, the Women's Freedom League and many of these sort of grassroots feminist organizations who made representation to the government on behalf of Irish women. Which I found absolutely fascinating because despite their political differences, they had a core goal which was the equality for women. So that was a very surprising find for me, that solidarity with these groups, the sense of purpose and the idea of promoting women in the professions. So I suppose amongst the other main groups that I've researched on, the Academy of Letters, Irish pen, as I mentioned, and the Women Writers Club, one of the collaborations was on the issue of censorship. Many of the women writers were banned, such as Maury Laverty, Kate o', Brien, Ethel Manon for example. And you know, there had to be some debates against this, there had to be some resistance against this. So how the Women Writers Club resisted that is that they often bestowed the literary prize on these women writers for their books. Or indeed they debated the issue which they knew would be reported in the newspapers. And in the case of Hannah She Skeffington, and this is quite interesting as well, when she was on her lecture tour to the UK and to Britain in 1937 and eight, she promoted banned writers as having a badge of honor for being banned. And I think that sort of maybe broke some ice amongst, you know, those who might be looking at it quite differently as well. But there was also a very interesting concerted effort by all these groups to campaign collectively for the reform of the Censorship Act. And particularly in the 1940s, you had the Women Writers Club, you had Irish, Pennsylvania, the Academy of Letters, and there was over 14 organizations involved in the book trade who joined forces, and they established a Council of Action with some very positive results. So. And all the time, they were always campaigning against the banning of creative literature. So I think that these collaborations were important. They're important to the story of literary life of the period. And it's not just about social networks, but it was also about their political campaigns. They really did, I think, demonstrate a united front on that issue of censorship.
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Colleen English
Thanks so much, Juju. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I love the way you draw that out, that these women all didn't necessarily share the same political views and things. I think you write the multifarious and potentially conflicting affiliations within the club, both internally and externally, were held together by a shared sense of purpose. So you've kind of highlighted that shared sense of purpose, in part is responding to the censorship. Were there any other things that linked them together that you saw as being of note in terms of the purposes and how they were united?
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
I think we could see that particularly within the Irish pen. And Irish pen, it was very interesting and is a very interesting organization as well. It was initially set up by Lady Gregory in 1924, but it didn't gain any traction until 1934, when Lord Longford established it with people like Hannah, she is Skeffington, and Sean O'. Whalone. And, you know, there's a list, you'll see it in the book, of many different writers, male and female, that were involved in it. And the approach that they have had a much more egalitarian approach to, I suppose, the literary field. This was coming off the back of the establishment of the Academy of letters in 1932, which was set up by W.B. yates and George Bernard Shaw. And I've always argued that maybe the setting up of the Academy of Letters was the catalyst for the Women Writers Club. And because most and a majority of the women writers of the period were omitted from membership as well, with some exceptions. So Irish PEN became a forum for interchange between males and females within that literary space. And there, I suppose, what their original focus was to promote Irish books and Irish writers, but they had a much more international approach as well, and they were linked in a very real way with international PEN and all the centers around the world. And they were very active in that. And there's lots of information showcasing how, you know, they were represented. The Irish PEN were represented abroad at Congress to the point where in 1953 this was very much recognized by international pen. And the first international congress was held in Dublin in 1953. And so for that week, Ireland was the center of literary life in the world, or at least we can claim that for that particular period. And some of the main writers from around the world came from different PEN centres to Ireland. So that's a really good example of that collaboration and interchange and overlapping membership between particular clubs as well.
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Colleen English
Yeah, I think that's fascinating about Irish Penn, because that was going to be my next question in terms of, like, what was the relationship between this branch of Penn and then the more international branches? Were there any really interesting correspondences or exchanges you saw between Irish writers and then the writers who came from international spaces to Dublin?
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Yeah, I think there was some friction, some tension at the time because this was a post war era and there was particular tension between the German centers, East and West. And what really came out of it was the, I suppose the importance, the sort of diplomatic efforts of the Irish PEN to try and sort of negotiate those tensions and maybe work around it. I think they held receptions in different venues, for example. But what was also came out of it was the joining with UNESCO to build bridges between nations. And Irish PEN during that congress was very instrumental in that project. And I think that that really kind of showcases how important, say, Irish PEN was to the period, but also even to the future as well. And I hope to do some additional work on the next International Congress, which was held in 1971. But I think it is a very good example of how collaboration and a bridge building exercise can really help in fostering good relationships.
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Colleen English
Yeah, it'd be fascinating to see kind of the trajectory there, since PEN does so much with international human rights as well as facilitating connections between writers. So I'm excited to read more about that project as you begin to develop it. The other thing I wanted to turn to is the kind of coterie and salon culture aspect of the book. So you highlight this as being an important part of female literary life in Ireland. So could you talk a little bit more about coterie culture and the support that it provided for women writers in Ireland?
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Yes, certainly. Silent culture in the early 20th century, at least, was often held in the homes of artists Stephen Gwyn, Sarah Purser, the artist, Catherine Tynan, the novelist, and Eblona Salkeld who was a well known salonier in Dublin in the early 20th century. So in many ways it was part of the social fabric, particularly within bohemian circles. But something seemed to change in the 1930s, maybe for those reasons that I mentioned earlier. You know, it was an age of transition as such. There was a more professionalization of different organizations, not just in women's groups, but, you know, across the board. And that changed the structure somewhat. You know, I've mentioned the Academy of Letters, the Irish PEN, and of course the Women Writers Club. So each entity was positioning itself for dominance in many ways in the literary field. And even though they were friends and they had very strong affiliations politically, theatrically and otherwise, it very much was part of the, I suppose, social structure that coteries evolved and that membership was interchangeable between different organizations as well. So you have a lot of Irish women writers in the Women Writers Club also involved very heavily in Irish pen, particularly at executive level. So there was this sense of solidarity amongst the groups. But in terms of women, I think what was important, I mentioned this earlier, they were very active in reviewing each other's books, in supporting each other in terms of their activities within the salon itself.
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Colleen English
Yeah, And I think one other thing kind of building off of that would be, did you see any evidence that they circulated, say, early drafts of manuscripts in the salons and things?
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Yeah, I think that was very important part of their monthly meetings. And since I've completed the book, actually, I found other material as well which was very exciting. And I recently published on that as well in English Studies, the Journal, and really kind of showcases that they were almost performing the act of writing in public spaces. They were discussing literature, but they were also looking at each other's work. They were giving advice and there's many different pieces of information which showcase that they were helping to review each other's work, even within those meetings, and helping with publication and that sort of thing. So you could see that the support, that sort of collegiality was very strong and a very important part of the coterie culture of the period as well.
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Colleen English
Great, thanks. So in you've talked a little bit about the Book of the Year prize, but that's really the focus of the third chapter of your book. You talk about it as an instrument of change. So maybe you could speak a little bit more about the cultural significance of this prize and how it aided in facilitating this kind of cultural change.
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Certainly. Well, I think its role in reshaping female literary culture was unprecedented. I've mentioned earlier, it was the first Irish Literary prize to be awarded to women writers. And I think it's important to kind of note the Academy of Letters. They also had their literary prizes and that was very vibrant, particularly when WB8S was at the forefront of that organization. But this was the first, I suppose, women's prize. It consisted of a non monetary prize which was awarded at the annual banquet. And what was kind of interesting about it is that behind the scenes there was a very active and vibrant reading committee and that were deciding who the winning texts and authors would be, but also, you know, I suppose, what their ethos and what their value system was going to come through in those winning texts as well. So the prize itself was an edition of the writer's book, which was bound and replete with gold lettering, according to one source that I read. But I think for the Women Writers Club themselves, they had a very clear understanding of the need to strategically market their books to a general audience. And it was a way, in many ways, of circumventing traditional distribution circuits and also a way of cultivating a brand or an image of the woman writer in the marketplace. So I say it was an instrument of change in many ways, because it helped in reducing or repairing damaged reputations from being a banned writer, or indeed it gave publicity to not only the writer, but to their book on a national scale, because it was reported in national papers. And the endorsement, I suppose, of the receiving of a literary prize, then and even now, it bestowed a badge of honour to the winner, it suggested literary accomplishment, it ensured that book reviews would follow, and it offered marketing materials to the publisher as well, which most likely resulted in higher sales. So for future researchers like myself, it left behind great evidence that we could trace histories and construct an idea about the philosophical intent of the club. But there was challenges, you know, where to start, how to think about the corpus. Even the output of texts, you know, from each individual varied to a very large extent. So to give an example, Rosamund Jacob published five books, whereas Patricia lynch, the children's author, she published 48 novels and over 200 stories. So for me, using the book of the year as a way of telling the story of the club and its literary prize was very, very useful. This episode is brought to you by Diet Coke. You know that moment when you just.
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
An ice cold Diet Coke isn't just a break.
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Dr. Deirdre Brady
Diet Coke.
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Colleen English
Great. Yeah, I think it definitely gives a good focus, as we've discussed earlier. And you talk about your methodology, particularly in chapter four, where you focus on the Irish book and Irish print culture. So your methodology is very informed by book history. So could you talk to us a little bit about how the idea of the Irish book developed and what role women writers played in its development in the revitalization of Irish print culture in the mid 20th century?
- [39:04]
Dr. Deirdre Brady
Well, the literary revival, which most of us are very familiar with of the late 19th century and early 20th century was critical to fostering the Irish book. And I've written in my own book about the contribution of women to Maunsell and how important women were to the Irish book publishing enterprises, and not just to Monsal, but to its successor, the Talbot Press. And indeed, you know, a lot of other scholars have pointed out the critical importance of best selling women authors to the economic fortunes of the presses. So they had a lot of financial clout in these presses. And during the Second World War, for example, 19 reprints alone of the author Annie P. Smithson was made by the Talbot Press. It was critical to their, I suppose, book sales at the time because this was a time of scarcity of resources as well, and other kind of ways of thinking about the book industry or the idea of an Irish book is by looking at periodicals. They were a very important outlet for women writers. Lucy Collins has done some very interesting work on this. She estimated that 25% of the content of the Dublin magazine, for example, was generated by women writers. And Mulholl too, she's confirmed that women posts were widely published and very well regarded at their time, which is why makes it more astonishing that, you know, so many have been forgotten about or almost forgotten about. So I think perhaps it demonstrates, you know, that, you know, it was difficult to get published, it was difficult to get promoted, and, you know, it was very difficult for all writers of the period. We have to remember that Ireland itself was a very small market. But if I was to look at one of the kind of interesting finds of the period was the material that I found in the Irish Book Fair. And I think it was one of the first book fairs held certainly in the 20th century that I'm familiar with, and it was held in 1941. So again, there's a significance around the timing as well during the war. And it was a way of promoting Irish books and their writers as well. And this was very successful. Actually. There's a kind of a story about it, you know, how successful it was, what its aims were in my book. But in summary, I suppose it took place in the Mansion House over a number of days. It was a resounding success. Over 6,000 people visited, which is quite a number of people, particularly during times of rationing and difficulties with transport. And it was initiated initially by what they call the Friends of the Academy of Letters. So here we have a new group to contend with. And this was a fundraising arm of the Academy of Letters. And so it was very successful in getting the contribution from some of the main Irish writers of the time, including George Bernard Shaw. But so it was reaching out to an audience, you know, in a wider, in a broader way to the general public, other people involved. Lennox Robinson Austin Clark, Elizabeth Bowen, they were amongst the list of speakers and there was thousands of books displayed there. So it's a very nice case study for business history as well, I think. But for me it's within the private printing presses where a more experimental, one might say a more feminist presence is seen. So we press as such that the Dunheemer Press and my colleague Kweline Vakan Mitchell has some wonderful work done on Evelyn Gleason and the eight sister who were behind this project. And there is a more well known, I suppose, project of the Koala Press, which was inspired by WB Yeats and his sisters and the Gayfield Press, which I've written about. But they tell a very important story about the impulse to publish as a way of revitalizing Irish print culture of the period and, you know, keeping to the fore that sort of notion of the Irish book.
- [43:21]
Colleen English
Thanks. And of course related to these private printing presses, Chapter five, you talk a lot about the Gayfield Press that you've mentioned earlier, which was founded by Blonhard Saltgeld. So could you talk a little bit about the Gayfield Press particularly and how that kind of contributes to this private printing press culture?
- [43:44]
Dr. Deirdre Brady
Yes, I think this was a very exciting part of the project for me as well. At that time there wasn't any mention of the Gayfield Press bar what I had found, as I mentioned earlier in the interview from Austin Clarke. And I really started to think about, you know, some of the names that were mentioned on that letter and I started to look at other archives and I came across the Sheila Wingfield papers and there was three letters from Blondet Salkhol to Sheila Winkfield in, I think it was 1937, pinpointing the aims of the press and also noting, I suppose, that it was a noble project to put a word on it because, you know, there was no fee paying involved. But I think what that really kind of showed to me was the importance of being published, but also the importance of taking agency as a writer as well and being able to put together, I suppose, publishing a body of work that represented not only your own work, but work of other important emerging poets as well. So I think that it's the Gainfield Press, it's culturally very important, not only as evidence that women could publish in a very male orientated industry, but it had at its core a philosophical impulse to promote young poets. So from my research, and again I'm piecing together shards of information trying to construct this history, I've established that they printed eight books and a series of Broadsheets, So not unlike the Koala Press in terms of its broadsheet delivery. But what they did was they received contributions from established poets like Austin Clarke, Paula Colliam, and they also received poems from new poets, younger poets, maybe Sheila Wingfield, Donna MacDonald, Roy McFadden, and what became one of their most important contributors, you were to Milne. So it was very much a platform for New Irish writing and for Salkeld herself. And so, as I say, it was really a story of taking agency and in many ways the story of business entrepreneurship. And it has some links, I think, with the Hogarth Press project in the uk, where Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf's project as well, you could see those similarities. And I've done some research on that link between Virginia Woolf and her influences on women writers. And there's a very strong link there. I presented it in the conference some years ago, but have yet to publish it. But I think it's kind of interesting to see these international modernist presses which were being managed and owned by women, and we're really showcasing, I suppose, some of the interesting experimental works by new poets and, you know, trying to sort of foster a tradition of poetry not only in the national sphere, but in the international sphere as well. So the process, as with all the research, was quite difficult. I was working from online library listings, fine art, auctioneering, websites, which was a great resource for me, and that chance finding from Wingfield, which really gave me the material I needed to construct some sort of a viable history. So I think it's important lies in not only its textual output, but also it really links in to the project of nation building, which the Irish book is central to, you know, in terms of forming a national identity. And while it might have been a personal project of the Salkho's, and it's important to remember that Cecil Salkeld, Blonet's son, was very heavily involved in it. I think he did a lot of the day to day work on the printing press. It was a wooden printing press, so I'm sure that was quite arduous in many ways. But it also gives space to artists of the time, you know, Jack B. Yeats, Manie Jellett and Cecil French. Salkeld, who was a modernist painter, was illustrating the poems as well. And that always adds a sort of richness for the reader as well. So it produced some radical texts of the period because it was only printing limited editions, up to 250 editions. You know, it really flew below the radar of the censorship board. And I think in Many ways, it represents a sort of a counter to, as was prevailing, the larger publishers of the time and pinpoints at presence of the late modernism in Ireland as well in the 1940s. So from my own knowledge, it stopped publishing in 1946. The reason, I'm not quite sure it could have possibly been ill health or perhaps it had for other reasons. But that is, I suppose, what I've come across so far.
- [48:59]
Colleen English
Thanks. Yeah, it's really fascinating to think about these private presses and kind of the more experimental poets that they encouraged, I suppose. Did you see anything in the correspondences about kind of how they chose, how they selected artwork to accompany the different poems and things they were publishing?
- [49:23]
Dr. Deirdre Brady
No, I didn't actually, but I suspect that they were possibly chosen by Cecil Salkeld, who, again, was very active himself in literary and artistic society in Dublin. He was well known. I think he features in one of Flanna Brown's novels. And I would imagine that it was probably his own connections or networks that informed, I suppose, who illustrated Water. Perhaps there are many different reasons, but I think what is important about it is it kind of shows that, I suppose, generosity of the artistic community in contributing free of charge to this project and again, more to do with this area.
- [50:12]
Colleen English
Yeah, great, thanks. And, of course, as I was reading this wonderful book, I was struck with the similarities between this female coterie culture that you describe in the mid 20th century and then the rise of popularity in Irish fiction, particularly works in by women, in the last decade or so. And there's been a real renewed contemporary global interest in Irish writing that's also emerging at this time, where women's rights and censorship are the subject of public debate more generally, and then also, you know, in places like the U.S. so how did you see the activities and accomplishments of the Women Writers Club as in some way kind of informing our present moment?
- [50:55]
Dr. Deirdre Brady
Yeah, that's a really important question, and I've toyed with that for a number of years, actually. I've been thinking about it quite a lot, and I'm delighted to see women writers coming to the fore and being successful internationally as well. I think that's really important. And I suppose some of my own more recent research is focusing on the international reach of the Women Writers Club, and perhaps that might even inform or provide some sort of a blueprint for emerging women rightists in the contemporary moment. But I think one lesson that they can take from this study maybe is the power of collective action. These women, they didn't work in isolation. They built networks nationally and internationally. They created alternative ways of engaging with the public through literary prizes, annual banquets, and in many ways they kind of resisted any narrowing of women's civic and cultural space. So that's really important, you know, to make sure that, you know, that you keep women's voices at the core of literary life in Ireland and internationally as well. So, you know, if we look at their campaigns, they agitated for the right to participate as full citizens in the public arena. And that's an increasing concern given the rise of authoritarianism worldwide for all women and men as well. And we could see that they fought against a very conservative patriarchal society with the right to control their voices and for full legislative equality. There's some of the issues that they agitated on, or for rather, they're not quite realized today. You know, anywhere where there's issues of representation, whether in politics or otherwise, or even censorship, whether it's implicit or explicit, it's a model of solidarity that I think remains very relevant. So the simple message is that collaboration can bring about change. And as you mentioned, this may have some resonance for women writers, but not just writers as well, for other women's groups. I think that's really important to say. These women really showed how leadership could be managed and how to do leadership in many ways. For me, I think their story brings hope and optimism. And even for women, you know, of a certain age, you know, they started this club when the average age was 46. They lasted 25 years. They really made their impact in the literary life of the period, but they have been forgotten up to recently or even erased. Kind of maybe tells a little bit about the decades afterwards rather than the decades in which they existed. So I'm hoping that the future scholarship from other scholars might focus on this area as well. There's also, of course, other material that might be of use to contemporary women writers, but we hope that we could continue, we'll say, this trajectory of publishing about the past, you know, to help inform the present and also the future as well.
- [54:18]
Colleen English
Thanks very much. Yeah, I think that that model of solidarity you highlight is very important to think about as people kind of look to the past and look to the Women Writers Club in Ireland as that kind of model. So I think that's really important. Well, thanks so much. This has been a wonderful conversation. So as this conversation has demonstrated, this is a fascinating and important book on Irish women's literary networks that works to present well known Irish writers in a new light. I think that's an important thing to highlight as well. So I highly recommend it to those interested in Irish studies, feminist studies, and literary studies more generally. So you can purchase it via the Liverpool University Press website and from independent booksellers as well as the usual outlets. Professor Brady, thank you so much for this invigorating talk.
- [55:07]
Dr. Deirdre Brady
Thank you, Colleen.
- [55:20]
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