Introduction: Joyce’s Sisters

The introduction positions Irish women writers as ‘Joyce’s sisters,’ as belated and misunderstood female writers akin to Woolf’s ‘Shakespeare’s sister,’ but in a postcolonial register in which feminization of the (post)colonial subject is the hallmark of the developmental narrative. This pushes the Irish woman writer and her developing protagonists even further to the representational margins. The developmental narratives of Irish women writers must thus be read through a novel postcolonial feminist psychoanalytic narratological lens, and their work must be considered within Irish literary history and its canon rather than simply in another short-lived project of feminist literary recovery. Irish women writers who have written fictional, non-fictional, and semi-fictional developmental narratives include Hannah Lynch, Kate O’Brien, August Gregory, Maud Gonne, Mary Colum, Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O’Brien, Dervla Murphy, Clare Boylan, Eavan Boland, Nuala O’Faolain, Anne Enright, Claire Keegan, Eimear McBride, Éilis ní Dhuibhne, Melatu Uche Okorie, and Soula Emmanuel. Their Irish female developmental stories have many narrational and formal similarities and must be read as disordered and often deliberately disorderly.