Contemporary Irish literature is showing a strong tendency to look backwards and evoke Irish migrants' experiences, an issue that is witnessing much success in the form of fictionalised lives of Irish migrant women. Sebastian Barry, Edna O'Brien, Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright are reputed writers who have focused on the topic very successfully. This phenomenon indicates a general interest in female migration, a very attractive topic for the Irish community. It also suggests a need to express from different perspectives the complexity of cultural identity negotiations. In this regard, Edna O´Brien´s The Light of Evening (2006) and Colm Tóibín´s Brooklyn (2009) deserve close attention as they explore the troubling sense of place endured by emigrated and returned Irish women in the 20th century. In these novels, physical and emotional (dis)locations problematise the traditional representations of Irish womanhood and their place within Irish society. An intersectional approach illuminates how these novels use migration to question female identification with the unitary national subject defended by the Irish nationalistic discourse at the time. This analysis also unveils the real and symbolic contradictions lived by Irish women experiencing displacement and it demonstrates how issues of identity are affected by geographical and cultural spatialities. Also, through the lens of translocational positionality (Anthias 2002, 2008), negotiations within the boundaries of time and space can be explored in order to analyse how the experiences of belonging and not belonging become complex practices shaped by the intersection of categories and spheres that are not fixed but evolving. In sum, this analysis seeks to disentangle the complex and contradictory factors that shaped female Irish migration and to how these are represented in the literary corpus from a gender perspective.
