Sarah Atkinson (1823-1893) in The Irish Quarterly Review, Duffy’s hibernian magazine, Duffy’s hibernian sixpenny magazine, the month and the Irish monthly: a study of nineteenth-century Irish women writers and their literary and publishing networks (1857-1893)

Abstract

Anchored in the nineteenth-century periodical archive, this recovery project takes Sarah Atkinson (1823-1893) as a centripetal force. An influential Irish Catholic middle-class writer and philanthropist, Atkinson lists work across a range of genres in the Irish Quarterly Review, Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine, Duffy’s Hibernian Sixpenny Magazine, The Month and the Irish Monthly. Her recovered periodical contributions guide the trajectory of this thesis. Also traced via a series of periodical case studies are the various contemporaries whose work appears alongside Atkinson’s. The list includes Julia Kavanagh (1824-1877), Mary Banim (c.1847-1939), Rosa Mulholland (1841-1921), Ellen Fitzsimon (1805-1883) and Katharine Tynan (1859-1931). From the vantage point of a safe but also enabling Catholic periodical space, Irish women writers’ exploitation of flexible and fluid genres is demonstrated to have reflected modern female attitudes that subverted gendered constructs of cultural authority in a male-dominated profession. Reclaiming these Irish women writers from contemporary periodicals. I explore how they pushed outwards to expand limiting expectations about the role and position of women . Literary critic and cultural historian John Wilson Foster argues that Atkinson was ‘one of the most brilliant Irish women of her generation’ (2008, p.125), yet her diverse non-fiction writing remains invisible on the Irish literary landscape. My thesis addresses such lacunae. Through recovery work, I demonstrate that Atkinson’s encouragement of other women writers, her social activism, and her until now unexamined connections with early English feminist Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925) created networks out of which come broader understandings of the period and new insights into Dublin's literary and publishing networks - the core project of this thesis.