Patricia Haberstroh and Christine St. Peter, editors. Opening the Field: Irish Women, Texts and Contexts.(Book review)

Patricia Haberstroh and Christine St. Peter, editors. Opening the Field: Irish Women, Texts and Contexts. Cork: Cork UP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-85918-410-3. $40.52 (hardcover).

This collection of ten essays by female critics from several nations applies a range of theoretical approaches to diverse texts written by Irish women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In so doing, the editors, Patricia Haberstroh and Christine St. Peter, show the value of studying texts by Irish women, which have finally been gaining some critical attention in recent years. Haberstroh and St. Peter's introduction to the essay collection contextualizes it within the growing body of scholarship on Irish women writers. The collection opens with an essay that demonstrates the need for a collection like this one that responds to traditional neglect of Irish women writers: Gerardine Meaney's essay explores the challenges of editing volumes IV and V of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which are devoted to women writers; these two volumes were published in 2002 to address complaints that the earlier volumes of the Field Day anthology included few women writers.

Haberstroh and St. Peter's essay collection is directed at a broad academic readership. That the writers of the essays teach at Irish Studies, Women's Studies, or English departments at universities in Ireland, Canada, Spain, Sweden, and the U.S. aims the collection at an international audience. Many of the essays in this collection begin by explaining the theoretical approach they will utilize. The essays end with brief discussions of the biographical and critical contexts of the authors and works discussed; these codas, like the introductions to theory at the opening of the essays, provide background that would be helpful to the undergraduate or general reader. Nevertheless, the meat of each essay is stimulating enough to enlighten Irish studies scholars, making Haberstroh and St. Peter's collection a valuable addition to any university library.

The distinguished poet Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, who edited Maria Edgeworth's Belinda (1801), provides an essay on masculinity in Edgeworth' s Ormond (1817). Ni Chuilleanain suggests that Edgeworth's novel is responding to ideas about masculinity in novels by Fielding and Austen, as well as to Edgeworth's own father's life and fictional narratives.

Heidi Hansson applies locational feminist theory to Harriet Martin's little-known novel, Canvassing (1832). Hansson's explanation of locational feminist theory is excellent, and it includes an interesting discussion of her own unusual position as a Swedish scholar of Irish literature. According to Hansson, Canvassing compares election campaigns with women's strategies for winning husbands in the marriage market. However, as Irish voters are disappointed in the British parliament, so are the two Irish protagonists disappointed in the English husbands that they won.

Patricia Coughlan examines Peig Sayers's autobiography, published in Irish in the 1930s, which has been used as a school text for teaching the Irish language for many decades. Living on the Great Blasket Islands as a mother of ten, Sayers was a famous oral storyteller who dictated her autobiography to her son and others. Coughlan contends that ...