March 1 to March 31
Year III
Year III
Claire Keegan
County Wicklow
Please consider joining us for the event. All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story, maybe on a story that means a lot to you or a writer you admire, or any related matter and let me know about it. I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.
Last year during Irish Short Story Month Year Two I posted on six short stories in Claire Keegan's highly regarded collection of stories, Antarctica. I had hoped to post this year on her second collection, Walk Through Blue Fields but that will not happen. I wanted to include her work in the event and I noticed one of the stories in the collection, "Men and Women" is also included in an anthology I am drawing from this year, Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women edited by Rebecca O'Connor. I read the story two times this week and really liked it. I think it deals very well with the general themes of the emotional reticence of the Irish, the relationship between the sexes and the differences in the ways girls and boys are raised. It shows beautifully how one family in rural Ireland works.
The story is told in the first person by a young woman, in her late teens. She has a brother who is considered "the brains" of the family so he is exempt from farm chores so he can study, her mother, and her father. Her father suffers from arthritis so the daughter goes with him when he goes out. The father buys and sells things from people in the area. In one scene I really enjoyed visualizing she tells us that when her father buys a few sheep he puts them in the back seat of the car and she has to keep them under control. We see the girl growing up and she does resent, who would not, her brother's privileged status and she wonders how her father can manage to dance with women not his wife at parties when he cannot get out of the car to open the gate at their house. At the local dances men twice her age ask her to dance. People tend to marry late in Rural Ireland and we see these "old bachelors" at the dances.
There is a great scene at the end where the wife at last asserts herself and demands a measure of respect. It was a very visual close and I loved it.
Author Data
Claire Keegan was born in 1968 and grew up on a farm in Wicklow. Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998. It announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction and was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2007 and won her the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Claire Keegan lives in County Wexford,
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