Sally Barr Ebest

Two decades ago, after attending an Irish Studies symposium where not a SINGLE paper was about Irish or Irish American women writers, I became entranced with Irish Studies. Surely there were Irish and Irish American women novelists! Suddenly, my early love of women's literature meshed with my feminist interests as I recognized a gap that definitely needed filling. I developed my first book (co-edited with Ron Ebest)—Reconciling Catholicism and Feminism? (Notre Dame 2003)--as I searched for topics to provide background for teaching on the topic. The second book (co-edited with the late Kathleen McInerney)--Too Smart to be Sentimental (Notre Dame 2008)--helped fill the knowledge gap with essays introducing the major authors in the field: Mary McCarthy, Maureen Howard, Maeve Brennan, Elizabeth Cullinan, Alice McDermott, Tess Gallagher, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary McGarry Morris, Eileen Myles, Mary Gordon, Jean McGarry, and Erin McGraw. After contextualizing these novels with their ethnic contemporaries as well as relevant political, historical, and religious history, this research culminated in The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers (Syracuse 2013)—the first book-length study of this somehow overlooked cohort of feminist writers. Syracuse will reissue it in paperback in Spring 2027.

But how did they develop their feminist bent? My next and most recent project entailed considerably more reading and research as I educated myself on the history and theories undergirding women's memoirs. If Irish-American women writers had been virtually unrecognized and their works unexplored, their autobiographies and memoirs were even less known. During my research, I found at least 70. Some were good; some were unremarkable, or at least unrecognizable as Irish-American products. But a few were outstanding. The memoirs by Kate Murray Millett, Mary McCarthy, Mary Cantwell, Maureen Howard, Mary Gordon, Caryl Rivers, Eileen Myles, and Patricia Gallagher Lockwood explored the psychic impacts of family and religion on their sense of self. Their works not only represent the most significant Irish-American Catholic women’s memoirs published in the last century, but also demonstrate their commonalities, for regardless of publication date, they share the same trait—a resistance to authority, specifically the Catholic Church—which maintained that women were illogical, evil, immoral, frail, and unintelligent. Irish-American Catholic women writers refused. You can explore their stories in Irish-American Catholic Women Writers vs. the Church, forthcoming from Routledge in August 2026.

--SBE