Pilgrimage to the Self: Autobiographies of Twentieth-Century Irish Women

Abstract

For millennia, well-known and uniquely talented women have negotiated linguistic paths through the social constructs of gender which surround them. It has been the female writer’s conundrum to determine the manner in which she speaks of her own life in a world where all ‘dignified’ available narrative methods are based on male experience. Her enterprise has been to write as an artist, philosopher, politician or religious without apologising for being female, obscuring her gender to the detriment of an authentic self-narrative, or absorbing male language and narrative strategies to the point that her voice becomes either male or androgynous. The Irish female autobiographers examined in this chapter had in most cases achieved public literary status before they engaged in life writing. So having approached the ‘master narrative’ of the littérateur early in their careers, they were already experienced negotiators of dominant narrative paradigms when they became autobiographers. Their writings form a continuum of Irish women’s literature from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, and their critical reception shows how theories of autobiography have progressed with the development of the genre. Autobiography, indeed, seems particularly susceptible to the influence of criticism, as theoretical texts influence autobiographers and critics alike. Examples of this influence pervade the life narratives of women; in the very act of self-writing, they tend to deny that autobiography is their objective, since for women the genre is often associated with exposés, ‘true confessions’ and other ‘non-literary’ forms.