Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Eavan Boland
Standard Name: Boland, Eavan
Birth Name: Eavan Aisling Boland
EB
was a leading Irish poet (latterly part resident in the USA) who also established a reputation as a critic writing on literary issues of feminism, nationalism, and modernism. Her work appeared in many anthologies as well as her own volumes, and she lectured internationally.
Though KOB
's surname was an ancient name of a royal house in Ireland, she was born into an often-forgotten segment of nineteenth-century society: the Irish Catholic
middle class. She calls her Irishness my accidental...
Fictionalization
Sappho
In the twentieth century Sappho
continued full of potential for poets and prose-writers. Naomi Mitchison
fictionalises her supposed school; Eavan Boland
takes her as guide on an underworld journey (as Dante took Virgil); Jeanette Winterson
Friends, Associates
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
ENC
counts many fellow-poets among her friends, including Eavan Boland
and Leland Bardwell
.
Friends, Associates
Kate O'Brien
One of those who stayed with KOB
in Galway was the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone
.
O’Brien, Kate. My Ireland. B. T. Batsford, 1962.
67
The poet Eavan Boland
, who felt much honoured when she met and entertained KOB
soon after her...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Bishop
The strength of EB
's influence on British and Irish poetry was variously recognised during the 1980s by Andrew Motion
, Seamus Heaney
, James Fenton
, and Eavan Boland
, and during the 1990s...
Intertextuality and Influence
Kate O'Brien
Lorna Reynolds
and Eavan Boland
liken this novel to the work of John Galsworthy
, as it is the saga of several generations of an Irish family building a business and growing in wealth.
Boland, Eavan, and Kate O’Brien. “Introduction”. The Last of Summer, Virago, 1990, p. v - xv.
xi
Literary responses
Elaine Feinstein
The New Yorker was grudging
“Books Briefly Noted. Anna of All the Russias”. The New Yorker, 17 Apr. 2006.
but Eavan Boland
wrote in the Spectator that Akhmatova's luck ha[d] held in provoking such a strong, vivid, and freshly informative biography.
Feinstein, Elaine. The Elaine Feinstein Page. http://www.elainefeinstein.com/.
Literary responses
Penelope Shuttle
The poet Anne Stevenson
, whose review offered these summaries of Shuttle's imagery, marvelled at the vulnerability of a dead-serious poetic voice(without the defences of aggression, wit, irony, mockery or word-play)
Stevenson, Anne. “Hearing the downpour”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4059, 16 Jan. 1981, p. 65.
65
which makes...
Literary responses
Penelope Shuttle
Reviewers were respectful, even enthusiastic. PS
was likened to poets as various as Eavan Boland
and Emily Dickinson
, and praised for energy, for vigorous and various abundance,and for attention to the erogenous zones...
Literary responses
Carol Ann Duffy
This book garnered the Forward Poetry Prize, the Whitbread Poetry Award, and another Scottish Arts Council
Book Award.
Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1994.
prelims
“The Knitting Circle”. London South Bank University: Lesbian and Gay Staff Association.
Eavan Boland
called CADone of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry—any poetry—for years.
qtd. in
Duffy, Carol Ann. Selected Poems. Penguin, 1994.
152
Literary responses
Kate O'Brien
Eavan Boland
calls this novel plangent and polemical.
Boland, Eavan, and Kate O’Brien. “Introduction”. The Last of Summer, Virago, 1990, p. v - xv.
xi
Publishing
Kate O'Brien
She finished writing it in September 1942, with the war at its height, deep in the English countryside at Croyle House near Cullompton in Devon. A stage adaptation by KOB
and John Perry
opened...
Reception
Kate O'Brien
Eavan Boland
reckons this book, together with Mary Lavelle, The Last of Summer, and The Land of Spices, as KOB
's finest novels.
Boland, Eavan, and Kate O’Brien. “Introduction”. The Last of Summer, Virago, 1990, p. v - xv.
x-xi
Textual Features
Ruth Padel
RP
takes the journey as the most central of all poetic images. The first part of her book is a guide to reading poetry, divided under headings of which many include the words journey,...
Textual Production
Anne Stevenson
AS
published a critique of Eavan Boland
's Outside History (not her poetry collection of that title, but an article in PN Review no. 75) for the same journal's no. 88.
Stevenson, Anne. Between the Iceberg and the Ship. University of Michigan Press, 1998.
71ff
Timeline
18 November 2017: A group of poets and academics calling itself...
Building item
18 November 2017
A group of poets and academics calling itself FIRED!
, formed to protest the absence of women from the new Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets, held its first event, at an arts centre in Belfast.
Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon. Jan. 2018, http://awomanpoetspledge.com/about-us/.
Texts
Boland, Eavan. 23 Poems. Gallagher Press, 1962.
Boland, Eavan. “A Boat on a River”. Mslexia, Vol.
6
, p. 10.
Corcoran, Clodagh et al. A Dozen Lips. Attic Press, 1994.
Boland, Eavan. A Kind of Scar. Attic Press, 1989.
Boland, Eavan. A Woman Without a Country. Carcanet Press, 2014.
Boland, Eavan. Collected Poems. Carcanet, 1995.
Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. Norton, 1994.
Boland, Eavan. In a Time of Violence. Carcanet, 1994.
Boland, Eavan, and Constance Short. In Her Own Image. Arlen House, 1980, http://ILL - Robarts.
