All of which is to say, Ireland’s classics are all-white and mostly male. That isn’t to say that these authors and their works are poor — far from it — but I often wonder about the women of Ireland who had stories of life under the British Empire, who experienced the loss of their land to the plantations, the loss of their sons and lovers to guerrilla and civil war, and the loss of their freedom with the conception of the Irish Free State in 1922. To note Ireland solely as a colonial victim would be an injustice too: plenty of Irish found themselves in the so-called new world, benefitting from the slave trade, notably in Jamaica. It’s a legacy Ireland has yet to properly address, though as Black Lives Matter grows in strength, questions are being asked at home about Ireland’s ugly impacts abroad. I wonder too about the lost stories of those we bought and sold, and how much resistance my ancestors showed in this. This list of classic books of Ireland is therefore a list of absences to some extent. I hope that in a century, it might look very different.
