Power to Observe ─ Irish Women Novelists in Britain, 1890-1916

Irish women flourished in the publishing world at the turn of the twentieth century, and a number of the most popular and prolific of these authors chose to live and work in Britain. As expatriates, these women occupied a complex cultural space between Ireland and Britain from which they were able to observe the rapidly altering political landscape in their homeland and, in particular, the debates that concerned them as women.
This book examines the lives and literature of six Irish novelists – Emily Lawless, L. T. Meade, George Egerton, Katherine Cecil Thurston, M. E. Francis and Katharine Tynan – who lived and worked in Britain between the years 1890 and 1916, between them producing nearly 500 published works. Drawing on a range of their novels, this study explores their participation in the prevailing debates of the era: the Irish Question and the Woman Question.
This book was the winner of the 2013 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

Whitney Standlee lectures in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Worcester. Her research interests include late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish women’s writing and women’s contributions to popular culture after 1880. She has published on the politics of Irish women’s writing, land war fiction and the Irish Kunstlerroman. Currently, she is co-editing the forthcoming collection Irish Women’s Writing 1878-1922: Advancing the Cause of Liberty.