"Factual Fictions": Representations of the Land Agitation in Nineteenth-Century Irish Women's Fiction

Writing in 1997, critic Siobhán Kilfeather observed: ‘Although the narrative of nineteenth-century fiction is often traced from Edgeworth to Somerville and Ross, I would argue that in this debate there is an exclusion of a certain kind of women’s writing and a demotion of the melodramatic and sensationalist aspects of nineteenth-century fiction that in Britain were associated with an appeal to woman readers.’ In spite of the best efforts of the editors of the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, volumes IV and V, few signs yet exist of any significant change in this condition of exclusion. In this essay, I wish to highlight another demotion, that of domestic or sentimental fiction, with specific reference to Irish women’s fiction from the late nineteenth century. This body of writing is especially interesting since it sought the incorporation of contemporaneous and often highly charged political subject matter into the existing modes of sentimental fiction, a notable example being the representation of contemporary land agitation by female novelists.