Five Irish women by Emer Nolan

Author:Emer Nolan [Nolan, Emer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women, History, Europe, Ireland, Social Science, Women's Studies, Gender Studies, Literary Criticism, General
ISBN: 9781526136763
Google: lHS5DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2019-09-16T03:18:17+00:00

4

Nuala O’Faolain: an emotional episode in public life

The death of Nuala O’Faolain in May 2008 at the age of sixty-eight was headline news in Ireland. The Guardian and the New York Times, among other international papers, published tributes and obituaries. This was startling because it was only in the last decade of her life that O’Faolain became famous as a best-selling author as well as an Irish public figure of a most unusual kind, held in great affection and widely admired for revealing her belief that her own life story was part of the general exposure of a repressive society to which she herself had almost unselfconsciously belonged.

Other women discussed here, including Edna O’Brien and Sinéad O’Connor, were famous from a young age. Both combined artistic talent with remarkable physical beauty. For O’Connor in particular, romantic relationships became part of the subject matter of her own work as well as the focus of huge media attention. She became a celebrity whose life and career was dominated by that dangerous cult. However much she evolved and changed, she remained soldered to that initial image. Even in trying to escape it, she reawakened and even enhanced it.

O’Faolain’s work and reputation are not captured by that pernicious kind of fame. She did not start out as a creative artist. Nor was she primarily a journalist, activist or campaigner in the style of so many influential Irish women writers of her generation. O’Faolain was a prize-winning student of literature at University College Dublin (UCD); she wrote a thesis at Oxford University and lectured in the Department of English at UCD for a time on her return to Ireland. However, she did not become a professional scholar and the often brilliantly insightful critical writing she published was in the form of short essays and reviews. She made television programmes for the Open University at the BBC in London, and later worked for the Irish state broadcaster, Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), as a producer and presenter of documentary and arts programmes. From the mid-1980s, she wrote a weekly opinion column for the Irish Times. But by her own account, this career was completely unplanned. She claimed to have got through university and later to have been offered prestigious jobs in large measure thanks to the generosity of friends and mentors. She stated that she greatly relished these chances to have her ‘say’1 on cultural and political matters in Ireland. But O’Faolain went on to make her most astonishing impact on the Irish public when she was already, in her own words, ‘that specially unloved thing in a misogynist society, a middle-aged woman with opinions’.2 And she did so in forms of the spoken and printed word that would usually be reckoned among the most informal and ephemeral. While she often appeared to affect an extreme humility or naivety, she created a persona and voice that rapidly became associated with a unique blend of confessional self-revelation and cultural authority.

When she was invited by a publisher to put together a volume of her newspaper columns, O’Faolain readily agreed.

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