Female Poets in Northern Ireland: A Past and Present

Katie Ward 

It is not hyperbolic to say that women’s voices have long been stifled across Belfast and Northern Ireland. If you Google ‘famous Northern Irish poets’, only nine out of twenty-seven results are women. In fact, celebrated female writers in Northern Ireland have historically been so scarce that, in 1985, feminist poet Ruth Hooley questioned, ‘does it mean an absence – are there [..] any women writing?’ [1] Hooley’s question might have been meant as rhetorical, but I want to answer it. There were women writing. In Northern Ireland’s history, there have always been women writing, and writing very well. But these women have historically been celebrated less, honored less, afforded less opportunities – and so we have been deprived of a rich history of female poetry in Northern Ireland. However, it is for this exact reason that we must celebrate the Northern Irish female writers of the past who we do know, and continue to uplift those we are lucky enough to have in the present.  

At first look at this literary scene, which appears so dominated by men (you think Belfast poetry, you think Heaney and Longley and Carson), it is easy to assume that any women writers we know of were desperately trying to worm their way into a space that had been established by men, and only men. Quite the contrary – one of the very first giants on the Belfast literary scene was a woman named Helen Waddell. Waddell, born in 1889, attended Queen’s University Belfast in its sapling years, and was a dominant force in her time. She translated anthologies of Chinese and Latin poetry, uncovered the history of the Goliards, was president of the Irish Literary Society, and enjoyed the company of legends such as Virginia Woolf and W.B Yeats – not to mention Queen Mary! [2]

From the very beginning, she was marked to stand out. She lived the first eleven years of her life in Tokyo before moving to Belfast – an unusual beginning, even now. Though she carried many aspects of Japanese life with her, she still adored Northern Ireland, and wrote about the Mourne Mountains in Banbridge. Her literary success was immeasurable, lending her huge popularity and influence with the people of her time. She was aware of this influence, and used it – in 1942, she protested the sentencing of six young IRA members in Belfast facing the death penalty, and in the end saved the lives of five of those men. Her life and career were so illustrious that in 1990, twenty-five years after Waddell’s death, Felicitas Corrigan published a biography of her life and work, earning the James Tait Black Award.  It is this very success that leads you to wonder – why isn’t ‘Waddell’ now synonymous with Heaney or Longley? After all, any Belfast poet who gained fame after her was travelling a path she had a great hand in beating.  

Unfortunately, after Waddell’s death, Belfast poetry started to suffer the perceived lull in female writers that led Ruth Hooley to pose her question. But this lull was not permanent; in 1979, the winner of the National Poetry Competition was a poem called The Flitting, by a man named Jean Fisher – who was actually Medbh McGuckian, writing under a pseudonym [3]. This was soon abandoned, and the name McGuckian became renowned. Seamus Heaney, who taught her at Queen’s University said of her; “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland”. She carved out a place for female writers in Belfast; her early poetry was commonly centered around femininity and the female anatomy, and she became the first woman to hold the position of writer in residence at Queen’s University. She has been the recipient of many awards, including the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. 

Today, almost forty years since Ruth Hooley questioned the existence of female writers in Northern Ireland, Belfast’s literary scene is bursting with their work. Sineád Morrisey, who won the T.S Eliot prize in 2014, Ruth Carr, who edited the first ever anthology of poetry by Northern Irish women, Leontia Flynn, Moyra Donaldson, Maureen Boyle – we are blessed with a positive abundance of female writers in Northern Ireland. We must keep celebrating the immense talent of women like these, and remembering those who came before them. Helen Waddell once wrote;

‘I think it will be winter when I die / (for no one from the North could die in spring)’ [5]

It is spring for female writers in the North, and they bloom beautifully. We must not let it become winter again.  

Sources:

[1]  Pryce, Alex, ‘Ambiguous silences? Women in anthologies of contemporary Northern Irish poetry’ http://www.troublesarchive.com/resources/ambiguous_silences.pdf  

[2] Oram, Hugh, ‘An Irishman’s Diary on medievalist and writer Helen Waddell’  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/an-irishman-s-diary-on-medievalist-and-writer-helen-waddell-1.1834442  

[3] Poetry Foundation,‘Medbh McGuckian’  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/medbh-mcguckian  

[4] Hanna, Adam “Medbh McGuckian”. In obo in British and Irish Literature, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199846719/obo-9780199846719-0148.xml  

[5] Waddell, Helen ‘The Mournes’  http://www.unsocialized.co.uk/2021/02/the-mournes-by-helen-waddell.html