Biography
Claire Keegan, born in 1968, was brought up on a farm in Ireland. An Irish writer, she is known for her short stories, which have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review.
Born in County Wicklow, Keegan is the youngest of a large Roman Catholic family. She traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, when she was 17 and studied English and political science at Loyola University. She returned to Ireland in 1992, and later lived for a year in Cardiff, Wales, where she undertook an MA in creative writing and taught undergraduates at the University of Wales. She subsequently received an M.Phil. at Trinity College Dublin.
Keegan's first collection of short stories, Antarctica (1999), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the William Trevor Prize.
Biography
Keegan has won the inaugural William Trevor Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Olive Cook Award and the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Other awards include the Hugh Leonard Bursary, the Macaulay Fellowship, the Martin Healy Prize, the Kilkenny Prize and the Tom Gallon Award. She was also a 2002 Wingate Scholar and a two-time recipient of the Francis MacManus Award.
She was a visiting professor at Villanova University in 2008. Keegan was the Ireland Fund Artist-in-Residence in the Celtic Studies Department of St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto in March 2009. In 2019, she was appointed as Writing Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Pembroke College Cambridge and Trinity College Dublin selected Keegan as the 2021 Briena Staunton Visiting Fellow.
The French translation of Small Things Like These has been shortlisted for two prestigious awards: the Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award and the Grand Prix de L'Heroine Madame Figaro. In March 2021, Claire and her French translator, Jacqueline Odin, won the Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award. Small Things Like These won the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and is the shortest book recognized in the history of the prize.
Publications
Antarctica, 1999
AMZ: This prize-winning debut collection of 15 stories by the acclaimed Irish author are “among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English” (The Observer).
The compassionate, witty, and unsettling short stories collected here announced Claire Keegan as one of Ireland’s most exciting and versatile new talents . . . From the titular story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind—to sleep with another man—Antarctica draws readers into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships.
In “Love in the Tall Grass,” Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date, with her lover, that has been nine years in the waiting. In “Passport Soup,” Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief.
Throughout the collection, Keegan’s characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory, and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved.
Publications
Walk the Blue Fields, 2007
AMZ: “Seven perfect short stories” from the award-winning author of Antarctica—“a writer who is instinctively cherished and praised” (The Guardian).
Claire Keegan’s brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was named a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. She continues her outstanding work with this new collection of quietly wrenching stories of despair and desire in modern-day Ireland.
In “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder whose ulterior motives emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage—and battles his memories of a love affair that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life. And in “Dark Horses,” a man seeks solace at the bottom of a bottle as he mourns both his empty life and his lost love.
A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past and of individuals struggling toward their futures, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from “that rarest of writers—someone I will always want to read,” and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart (Irish Times).
Publications
Foster, 2010
AMZ: An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US.
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker, this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.
Publications
Small Things Like These, 2021
She also speaks at creative writing courses. See her website! https://ckfictionclinic.com/
"This course will introduce different ways in which reading creative works changed as different critical theories developed, and it will help writers focus on how they hone their own creative processes.
We will discuss how the silenced voices of women and minorities challenged the canon and how we as writers are influenced not only by personal experience, but also by larger political and social movements.
We read and write, not in an attic room but in a large and complex changing world."
Cast of characters
William (Bill) Furlong, coal and wood merchant, hard-working, successfully provides for his family
Wife Eileen and 5 daughters—Kathleen, Joan, Sheila, Grace, Loretta
"His mother, [Sarah] at the age of sixteen, had fallen pregnant while working as a domestic for Mrs. Wilson, the Protestant widow who lived in the big house a few miles outside of town. When his mother’s trouble became known, and her people made it clear that they’d have no more to do with her, Mrs. Wilson, instead of giving his mother her walking papers, told her she should stay on, and keep her work. On the morning Furlong was born, it was Mrs. Wilson who had his mother taken into hospital, and had them brought home."
Mrs. Wilson
"who had no children of her own, took him [Bill] under her wing, gave him little jobs and helped him along with his reading. She had a small library and didn’t seem to care much for what judgements others passed but carried temperately along with her own life, living off the pension she received on account of her husband having been killed in the War, and what income that came from her small herd of well-minded Herefords, and Cheviot ewes.
Cast of characters
Mrs. Wilson
" . . . seldom was there much friction around the place or with neighbors as the land was well fenced and managed, and no money was owing. Neither was there much tension over religious beliefs which, on both sides, were lukewarm; on Sundays, Mrs. Wilson simply changed her dress and shoes, pinned her good hat onto her head and was driven as far as the church by Ned in the Ford, which was then driven a little farther on, with mother and child, to the chapel – and when they returned home, both prayer books and the bible were left lying on the hallstand until the following Sunday or holy day.
She also gave Furlong a copy of A Christmas Carol, Dickens, as a gift.
Cast of characters
Ned, Mrs. Wilson's farmhand, and Bill's father
Just before Christmas, Furlong goes to visit Ned, but discovers that he's in the hospital, with suspected bronchitis. Mrs. Wilson's family now owns the property and one of their guests answers the door, and comments that it's obvious Ned and Furlong are related. Thus the mystery of Furlong's paternity is solved, although Ned never admits to it.
"He [Furlong] could not help thinking over how down-hearted Ned had been in himself after Furlong’s mother had passed away, and how they had always gone to Mass and eaten together, the way they stayed up talking at the fire at night, what sense it made.
And if this was truth, hadn’t it been an act of daily grace, on Ned’s part, to make Furlong believe that he had come from finer stock, while watching steadfastly over him, through the years.
This was the man who had polished his shoes and tied the laces, who’d bought him his first razor and taught him how to shave. Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?"
Cast of characters
Mrs. Kehoe, owns the local restaurant where Furlong's men ate lunch:
" . . . where they were fed hot dinners with soup, and fish & chips on Fridays."
As part of their Christmas bonus, Furlong buys dinner for all his men at Mrs. Kehoe's.
The dinners they ate in Kehoe’s that day were paid for by the yard. Mrs. Kehoe, wearing a new, festive apron, went around the tables offering more gravy and extra mash, sherry trifle, Christmas pudding and cream.
The men ate at their leisure and stayed on, sitting back with pints of stout and ale, passing out cigarettes and using the little red paper napkins she’d left out to blow their noses.
Furlong didn’t wish to linger; all he wanted, now, was to get home, but he stayed on as it felt proper to idle there for a while, to thank and wish his men well, to spend time on what he seldom made the time for. Already, they had been given their Christmas bonuses. Before he went to settle the bill, they shook hands.
Cast of characters
After Furlong has visited the convent to make a delivery, and finds the young mother locked in a coal shed, he visits Mrs. Kehoe, who advises him:
‘Tis no affair of mine, you understand, but you know you’d want to watch over what you’d say about what’s there? Keep the enemy close, the bad dog with you and the good dog will not bite. You know yourself.’
‘Take no offence, Bill,’ she said, but surely you must know these nuns have a finger in every pie.’
He stood back then and faced her. ‘Surely they’ve only as much power as we give them, Mrs. Kehoe?’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’ She paused then and looked at him the way hugely practical women sometimes looked at men, as though they weren’t men at all but foolish boys.
Cast of characters
Mother Superior, in charge of the Good Shepherd nuns at the convent, "training" program, laundry. When Furlong discovers and frees the young woman, Sarah Redmond, known as Enda, the Mother Superior explains that the girls had been playing a game of hide and seek.
Furlong stays for tea:
Furlong watched the girl being taken away and soon understood that this woman wanted him gone—but the urge to go was being replaced now by a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground. Already, it was growing light outside. Soon, the bells for first Mass would ring. He sat on, encouraged by this queer, new power. He was, after all, a man amongst women here.
Cast of characters
During their conversation, she says:
‘Were your sailors in town this week?’
‘They’re not my sailors but we had a load come in on the quay there, aye.’
‘You don’t mind bringing the foreigners in.’
‘Hasn’t everyone to be born somewhere,’ Furlong said. ‘Sure wasn’t Jesus was born in Bethlehem.’
‘I’d hardly compare Our Lord to those fellows.’ She’d had more than enough now, and put her hand down deep, into a pocket, and drew out an envelope.
Sister Carmel is another of the nuns, teaches music lessons at St. Margaret's, the secondary school next to the convent; Furlong's daughter sings in the choir and two of them take music lessons, accordion.
Cast of characters
Sarah Redmond, although known as "Enda" among the women at the convent; Furlong's mother's name was Sarah
Woman with cinnamon-colored hair, and a kettle of hot water, which Furlong used to break the ice on his yard's padlock. When he returns, she's pouring hot milk over Weetabix for the children:
He stood for a moment taking in the peace of that plain room, letting a part of his mind turn loose to stray off and imagine what it might be like to live there, in that house, with her as his wife.
Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life, elsewhere, and wondered if this was not something in his blood; might his own father not have been one of those who had upped, suddenly, and taken the boat for England?
It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.
Cast of characters
Sinnott—mentioned only a couple of times—getting his hair cut in the barbershop when Furlong visits before Christmas. It is Sinnott's boy to whom Furlong gives his loose change as he tells wife Eileen:
‘Mick Sinnott’s little chap was out on the road again today, foraging for sticks.’
‘I suppose you stopped?’
‘Wasn’t it spilling rain. I pulled over and offered him a lift and gave him what bit of change was loose in my pocket.’
‘I dare say.’
‘You’d think it was a hundred pound I’d given him.’
‘You know some of these bring the hardship on themselves?’
‘Tis not the child’s doing, surely.’
‘Sinnott was stotious at the phone box on Tuesday.’ ‘The poor man,’ Furlong said, ‘whatever ails him.’
‘Drink is what ails him. If he’d any regard for his children, he'd not be going around like that. He’d pull himself out of it.’
‘Maybe the man isn’t able.’
Symbols
Barrow, the river that runs through town. It supposedly has a curse that "had to do with an order of monks who’d built an abbey there, in the old days, and were given the right to levy tolls on the river. As time went on, they grew covetous and the people had rebelled and driven them from the town. When they were leaving, the abbot put a curse on the town, so that every year it would take three lives, neither more nor fewer."
While walking along the river, on his way to the convent, "Furlong carried on uneasily, thinking back over the Dublin girl who’d asked him to take her here so she could drown, and how he had refused her; of how he had afterwards lost his way along the back roads, and of the queer old man out slashing the thistles in the fog that evening with the puckaun, and what he’d said about how the road would take him wherever he wanted to go.
As he's walking along, after rescuing Sarah,
"a part of him envied the Barrow’s knowledge of her course, how easily the water followed its incorrigible way, so freely to the open sea."
Symbols
Setting, landscape, environment, weather
NOTE: the story is set in the small town of New Ross, in 1985. But the atmosphere may make the time frame seem earlier, like 1940s or 50s or even earlier.
Doors, walls—like the walls surrounding the convent with broken glass on top
Birds
Christmas
Other
Translations
Leanbh means child, baby
When Furlong visits Ned one evening, Ned sings "The Croppy Boy." Furlong is so moved by the song that he asks Ned to sing it again. A "croppy" is one of the Irish rebels of 1798 who wore their hair cut close to the head as a token of sympathy with the French Revolution.
Baby power—Irish whiskey
Stotious--drunk
Questions for discussion
Bill Furlong is the main character, protagonist, "hero" of this story. How would you describe him? What kind of person is he?
Questions for discussion
Is it significant that the main character in this story is a man, a grown, married man with 5 daughters?
Questions for discussion
Small Things Like These has been described as historical fiction, yet the author disagrees with it being a novel about the Magdalene laundries (Guardian interview, October 21).
If it's not historical fiction, and I agree that it isn't, what's this story about?
Questions for discussion
What does the title refer to? What are the "small things like these"?
Story's ending
As they carried on along and met more people Furlong did and did not know, he found himself asking was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
The fact was that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.
The worst was yet to come, he knew. Already he could feel a world of trouble waiting for him behind the next door, but the worst that could have happened was also already behind him; the thing not done, which could have been – which he would have had to live with for the rest of his life. Whatever suffering he was now to meet was a long way from what the girl at his side had already endured.
NOTE; while he's walking along with the bare-foot girl, he's carrying a box of fancy shoes for his wife.
Questions for discussion
The book ends at a point where many other authors would begin their novels’ second act. To what extent is Keegan deliberately asking the reader to create the rest of the story for themselves? What do you think happens to Bill Furlong next?
A number of reviewers have commented that the story seems too short, that it ends with questions unanswered, or issues unresolved. One reviewer described it as "deliberately provocative." Is this true?
What do you think of the ending?
What the author said
"It started out as a short story told from the point of view of a boy who accompanies his father to deliver a load of coal and finds another boy, much his own age, locked up in the coal shed at a boarding school. His father just locked the door then went on to make the next delivery, saying nothing.
‘At some point, the coalman’s point of view took over and I became preoccupied with him and it felt necessary to explore how he, the father, would carry this knowledge around with him on his rounds, through his days, through his life and how or if he could or would still regard himself as a good father. I’m not even sure if this man, Furlong, can regard himself as a good father after this novel ends - as he may have deprived his daughters of a decent education and may lose his business, may not be able to provide for his family.
‘I’m interested in how we cope, how we carry what’s locked up in our hearts. I wasn’t deliberately setting out to write about misogyny or Catholic Ireland or economic hardship or fatherhood or anything universal, but I did want to answer back to the question of why so many people said and did little or nothing knowing that girls and women were incarcerated and forced to labor in these institutions. It caused so much pain and heartbreak for so many. Surely this wasn’t necessary or natural?’
What the author said—The Guardian
But woe betide anyone who assumes it is “about” the Magdalene Laundries. “I disagree,” Keegan says, firmly, when I suggest that it is. Talking over video call from her home in the west of Ireland, she says “I think that [the laundries scandal] overshadows the community Bill Furlong lives in. It’s his atmosphere. It’s the environment. But I don’t think it’s the story at all. I think this is the story of a man with five daughters, in a marriage, who’s running a coal yard and is probably a workaholic, and maybe facing some kind of midlife crisis. I think it’s a story about a man who was loved in his youth and can’t resist offering the same type of love to somebody else. And it may actually be a self-destructive thing. I think this is a love story. It’s not a romantic love story. But it’s a story about love.”
What the critics say:
The Booker judges described Keegan as "measured and merciless as she dissects the silent acquiescence of a 1980s Irish town in the Church’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers - and the cost of one man’s moral courage."
It is the tale, simply told, of one ordinary middle-aged man - Bill Furlong - who in December 1985, in a small Irish town, slowly grasps the enormity of the local convent’s heartless treatment of unmarried mothers and their babies (one instance of what will soon be exposed as the scandal of the Magdalene laundries). We accompany Furlong, and we feel - and fear - for him as he realizes what is happening, decides how he must in conscience act, and accepts what that action, in a small church-dominated town, will cost him, his wife and his children.
The book is not so much about the nature of evil as the circumstances that allow it. More than Furlong’s quiet heroism, it explores the silent, self-interested complicity of a whole community, which makes it possible for such cruelty to persist. It forces every reader to ask what they are doing about the injustices that we choose not to think about too closely. Astonishingly, Keegan achieves this without ever sounding angry or preachy.
What the critics say:
The Times:
‘The novel isn’t just an eloquent attack on the Magdalene laundries. It is also a touching Christmas tale, genuinely reminiscent of the festive stories of O Henry and Charles Dickens; a novel that has been seeped in sherry and served by the fireside. In one particular moment, when Furlong’s wife and daughters gather to ice the Christmas cake, Keegan’s writing approaches Proust.’
What the critics say:
One critic, in the Harvard Review wrote that:
It is a compelling plot device to put Furlong in conflict with this institution [Catholic church] and the local Mother Superior after he discovers a girl locked in a convent coal shed, but the conflict appears suddenly, culminates quickly, and leaves too many questions unanswered.
Also, what may be a life-changing revelation about Furlong’s father is delivered in an offhand manner.
What the critics say:
This same critic also wrote that:
There is also a discomfiting imbalance between the rich and empathic portrayal of Furlong and that of the women in the story. All of [the women], besides Mrs. Wilson, who resides in memory, seem to be unfeeling enablers of a corrupt institution. Furlong’s wife, Eileen, the most vividly rendered of them, is downright scornful of her husband’s kindness and empathy.
Furlong even sees his daughters, who otherwise get short shrift in the narrative, “as young witches sometimes . . . with their black hair and sharp eyes.”
Nor do we get a full sense of Furlong’s mother beyond his memory of a “strong, freckled arm” and her singing while milking the cow.
What the critics say:
Keegan is, however, a masterful renderer of environments, which accord with the sorrow and dismal hardship of the story. The book opens with a time-lapse–style image of the town in fall and winter, from the “yellow trees” of October to the “long November winds”: “chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.”
Later, the descriptions reflect Furlong’s growing awareness of corruption:
On the street, a dog was licking something from a tin can, pushing it noisily across the pavement with his nose. Already the crows were out, sidling along and letting out short, hoarse caws and longer, fluent kaaahs as though they found the world objectionable. One stood tearing at a pizza box … quickly flying off with a crust in his beak.
What the critics say:
Small Things Like These has been described as historical fiction, yet the author disagrees with it being a novel about the Magdalene laundries (Guardian interview, October 21), saying,
"I think it's a story about a man who was loved in his youth and can't resist offering the same type of love to somebody else."
Magdalene Laundries
"How Ireland Turned "Fallen Women" into Slaves
History
Erin Blakemore
Original: March 12, 2018--Updated: July 21, 2019
https://www.history.com/news/magdalene-laundry-ireland-asylum-abuse
Magdalene laundries
The interior of the now derelict Sisters of Our Lady of Charity Magdalene laundry on Sean McDermott St. in Dublin’s north inner city on the day the Irish government apologized to the thousands of women locked up in Catholic-run workhouses known as Magdalene laundries between 1922 and 1996.
Magdalene laundries
Until 1996, pregnant or promiscuous women could be incarcerated for life in Magdalene Laundries.
When the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some land they owned in Dublin, Ireland, to pay their debts in 1992, the nuns followed the proper procedures. They petitioned officials for permission to move the bodies of women buried in the cemetery at their Donnybrook laundry, which between 1837 and 1992 served as a workhouse and home for “fallen women.”
But the cemetery at Donnybrook was no ordinary resting place: It was a mass grave. Inside were the bodies of scores of unknown women: the undocumented, uncared-about inmates of one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene laundries. Their lives—and later their deaths—had been shrouded in secrecy.
For more than two centuries, women in Ireland were sent to institutions like Donnybrook as a punishment for having sex outside of marriage. Unwed mothers, flirtatious women and others deemed unfit for society were forced to labor under the strict supervision of nuns for months or years, sometimes even for life.
Magdalene laundries
When the mass grave at Donnybrook was discovered, the 155 unmarked tombs touched off a scandal that exposed the extent and horrors of the Magdalene laundries. As women came forward to share their experiences of being held against their will in restrictive workhouses, the Irish public reacted with outrage.
When the Magdalene Movement first took hold in the mid-18th century, the campaign to put “fallen women” to work was supported by both the Catholic and Protestant churches, with women serving short terms inside the asylums with the goal of rehabilitation.
Over the years, however, the Magdalene laundries—named for the Biblical figure Mary Magdalene—became primarily Catholic institutions, and the stints grew longer and longer. Women sent there were often charged with “redeeming themselves” through lace-making, needlework or doing laundry.
Though most residents had not been convicted of any crime, conditions inside were prison-like. “Redemption might sometimes involve a variety of coercive measures, including shaven heads, institutional uniforms, bread and water diets, restricted visiting, supervised correspondence, solitary confinement and even flogging,” writes historian Helen J. Self.
Magdalene laundries
Ireland’s first such institution, the Magdalen Asylum for Penitent Females in Dublin, was founded by the Protestant Church of Ireland in 1765. At the time, there was a worry that prostitution in Irish cities was on the rise and that “wayward” women who had been seduced, had sex outside of marriage, or gotten pregnant out of wedlock were susceptible to becoming prostitutes. Soon, parents began to send their unmarried daughters to the institutions to hide their pregnancies.
Initially, a majority of women entered the institutions voluntarily and served out multi-year terms in which they learned a “respectable” profession. The idea was that they’d employ these skills to earn money after being released; their work supported the institution while they were there.
But over time, the institutions became more like prisons, with many different groups of women being routed through the system, sometimes by the Irish government.
Magdalene laundries
There were inmates imported from psychiatric institutions and jails, women with special needs, victims of rape and sexual assault, pregnant teenagers sent there by their parents, and girls deemed too flirtatious or tempting to men. Others were there for no obvious reason. Though the institutions were run by Catholic orders, they were supported by the Irish government, which funneled money to the system in exchange for laundry services.
Nuns ruled the laundries with impunity, sometimes beating inmates and enforcing strict rules of silence. “You didn’t know when the next beating was going to come,” said survivor Mary Smith in an oral history.
Smith was incarcerated in the Sundays Well laundry in Cork after being raped; nuns told her it was “in case she got pregnant.” Once there, she was forced to cut her hair and take on a new name. She was not allowed to talk and was assigned backbreaking work in the laundry, where nuns regularly beat her for minor infractions and forced her to sleep in the cold. Due to the trauma she suffered, Smith doesn’t remember exactly how long she spent in Sundays Well. “To me it felt like my lifetime,” she said.
Magdalene laundries
Smith wasn’t alone. Often, women’s names were stripped from them; they were referred to by numbers or as “child” or “penitent.” Some inmates—often orphans or victims of rape or abuse—stayed there for a lifetime; others escaped and were brought back to the institutions.
Another survivor, Marina Gambold, was placed in a laundry by her local priest. She recalls being forced to eat off the floor after breaking a cup and getting locked outside in the cold for a minor infraction.
“I was working in the laundry from eight in the morning until about six in the evening,” she told the BBC in 2013. “I was starving with the hunger, I was given bread and dripping for my breakfast.”
Some pregnant women were transferred to homes for unwed mothers, where they bore and temporarily lived with their babies and worked in conditions similar to those of the laundries.
Magdalene laundries
Babies were usually taken from their mothers and handed over to other families. In one of the most notorious homes, the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, scores of babies died.
In 2014, remains of at least 796 babies were found in a septic tank in the home’s yard; the facility is still being investigated to reconstruct the story of what happened there.
How did such an abusive system endure for 231 years in Ireland? To start with, any talk of harsh treatment at the Magdalene laundries and mothers’ homes tended to be dismissed by the public, since the institutions were run by religious orders.
Survivors who told others what they had been through were often shamed or ignored. Other women were too embarrassed to talk about their past and never told anyone about their experiences. Details on both the inmates and their lives are scant.
Magdalene laundries
Estimates of the number of women who went through Irish Magdalene laundries vary, and most religious orders have refused to provide archival information for investigators and historians. Up to 300,000 women are thought to have passed through the laundries in total, at least 10,000 of them since 1922. But despite a large number of survivors, the laundries went unchallenged until the 1990s.
Then, the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity decided to sell some of its land in 1992. They applied to have 133 bodies moved from unmarked graves on the property, but the remains of 155 people were found.
When journalists learned that only 75 death certificates existed, startled community members cried out for more information. The nuns explained there had been an administrative error, cremated all of the remains, and reburied them in another mass grave.
The discovery turned the Magdalene laundries from an open secret to front-page news.
Magdalene laundries
Suddenly, women began to testify about their experiences at the institutions, and to pressure the Irish government to hold the Catholic Church accountable and to pursue cases with the United Nations for human rights violations. Soon, the UN urged the Vatican to look into the matter, stating that “girls [at the laundries] were deprived of their identity, of education and often of food and essential medicines and were imposed with an obligation of silence and prohibited from having any contact with the outside world.”
As the Catholic Church remained silent, the Irish government released a report that acknowledged extensive government involvement in the laundries and the deep cruelty of the institutions. In 2013, Ireland’s president apologized to the Magdalene women and announced a compensation fund.
Magdalene laundries
Due in part to the uproar surrounding the discovery of the mass grave, the last Magdalene laundry finally closed in 1996. Known as the Gloucester Street Laundry, it was home to 40 women, most of them elderly and many with developmental disabilities. Nine had no known relatives; all decided to stay with the nuns.
Although Smith managed to reclaim her own life, she understands the damage that long-term institutionalization can inflict.
“My body went into shell shock when I went there. When that door closed, my life was over,” Smith recalled in her oral history.
“You see all these women there and you know you’re going to end up like them and be psychologically damaged for the rest of your life.”
Summary of class
We began and are ending with books that are literary, or close to it.
Maggie O'Farrell, The Marriage Portrait
An exquisitely written historical novel, like Hamnet, that gives Lucrezia di Medici life once again through the imaginative re-creation of her story. Throughout it's juxtaposed, metaphorically, with Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" in which only her husband has a voice and in which she lives only as a portrait, a facsimile.
Daniel Silva, Portrait of an Unknown Woman
The most recent Gabriel Allon novel, art dealer, restorer, and painter, and another in the series of male-author espionage or hard-boiled detective genre. A best seller, but not big on literary aspirations.
Jane Smiley, Perestroika in Paris
An unusual "romp" among her exploration of genres, with an anthropomorphic story line about horses, dogs, ravens, ducks, and an 8-year-old boy Etienne around whom the animals form a community to support him
Kate Quinn, The Diamond Eye
Another of her excellent historical novels, this one resurrecting from the dust bin of history the story of a Russian sharp shooter, Mila Pavlichenko, who meets Eleanor Roosevelt; like all her novels, based on historical fact.
Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures
Her debut novel about Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus, who solves the mystery of an old woman's son and creates a new family. Not anthropomorphic, but an exploration of what it means to be an octopus, to see a creature for what he is and accept him.
Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice
A funny novel in a mystery series about septuagenarians who solve crimes that gives "center stage" to a reading population often overlooked as the protagonists of any kind of novel.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
Back to my theme: that writers don't write about the world holed up in an attic, but in a large, inclusive and expanding world.
Videos
The Booker Prize
Bookish
END OF TERM!
If you would like to check out the books and topics for the fall course 2023, please click on the following website for that course. It will be offered both in an online Zoom section and in an in-person Arsht Hall classroom.
https://sites.google.com/udel.edu/novelties/