There is a saying in Irish: faigheann foighid forthacht; patience is rewarded. Mairin Nic Eoin's patient study has been rewarded. Already well-known, well-established and well-regarded within Irish-speaking academia, she has found herself the object of attention since being awarded the Irish Times Literature Award for a book in the Irish language, B'ait Leo Bean. "English-speaking colleagues have been congratulating me on my `new' book which has been published for almost two years," she says.
A Limerick woman by birth, she has spent almost her entire life in Dublin. Educated at Sion Hill, Blackrock, and at UCD, she was appointed a lecturer in the Department of Irish at Saint Patrick's College, Drumcondra, in 1981. Since then, she has made a contribution to Irish letters which is considerable for any scholar in her early 40s. Indeed, she has contributed to the cultural life of the city in more ways than just academically. She was one of the founders of Raidio na Life, Dublin's only voluntary Irish-language station.
Nic Eoin has published two works which are regarded as standard texts in their field. An Litriocht Reigiunach (1982) is a study of the early days of revivalist literature and its impact and influence on the Gaeltacht. It is no exaggeration to say that for anyone wishing to study in this particular area Nic Eoin's book remains a vital and necessary starting point. Similarly, her biography of the poet and dramatist Eoghan O Tuairisc, Eoghan O Tuairisc: beatha agus saothar (1988) is required reading for anyone with an interest in his work. Her third major work, B'ait Leo Bean (1998), has reinforced the view that she is steadily becoming one of the foremost scholars of modern Irish literature.
To someone unfamiliar with Irish she sums up the book as being "a study of aspects of gender ideology in the Irish literary tradition. It examines, in particular, how a certain set of ideas about female nature became dominant within that tradition and how these ideas came to be recycled and reiterated at different periods in different literary genres. The book also seeks to present the evidence for female literary production in Irish and place this literary production in the context of dominant notions about female creativity."
The work originally began in 1990 as a lecture on the "Depiction of Women in Books". Another invitation followed from the Merriman Winter School in 1991 and the book was published seven years later. The genesis of the work then is to be found in debate and that debate carries on.
Does she believe there is such a thing as feminist literary theory? "Yes, feminist literary theory is an important strand in contemporary literary theory and has offered rich insights into questions such as the politics of cultural production, the construction of literary canons and the linguistic nature of creative (and particularly poetic) writing. Feminist literary theory, like feminism itself, is a multi-faceted phenomenon, the underlying core of which is an interest in the relationship between women's actual experience and the expression of that experience in literature."
HOW then should we approach the subject: is it women's literature or literature by women? "Literature by women is probably a more useful term than `women's literature'. However, I think historically that women's creativity has been channelled into particular directions, often associated with women's social roles as mothers and wives. This happened in the Irish poetic tradition, where women came to be associated, historically, with a much narrower range of genres than men."
Nic Eoin is not frightened to use the F word either though she is wary of the connotations other people attach to "feminist": "I would seek to avoid self-labelling as much as possible and am aware of the manner in which terms such as `feminist', or `Gaeilgeoir' for that matter, have become derogatory terms on the lips of certain people. I do consider myself a feminist, however, insofar as I refuse to accept that any woman's education, life chances, potential for human development and fulfilment should be determined by biology, and insofar as I recognise that women's social position historically was in large part socially constructed, not least through the employment of thought systems designed to present inequitable gender and social relationships as `natural' or `inevitable'."
Above all else, the contribution of women to literature has been a positive one, she says. They have informed the language through their scholarship, through their work as editors, as authors, as dramatists, as poets, as literary historians and as critics. She mentions Eleanor Knott's "pathbreaking" study of classical Irish poetry; Cecile O'Rahilly's editions of Tain Bo Cuailnge; Mairin Ni Mhuirgheasa's contribution to literary history and the pioneering poetry of both Maire Mhac an tSaoi and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill.
You can add another name to that list of achievers: Mairin Nic Eoin.
B'ait Leo Bean by Mairin Nic Eoin is published by An Clochomhar