Irish Women’s Confessional Writing: Identity, Textuality and the Body

Abstract

In recent times, the Irish literary arena has witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of women’s life writing, with a special interest in the examination of the female body. These works explore the relations between identity, memoir, and narration through the confessional, and reconceptualise the female body in the Irish context. This article sets out to examine collections of essays by two of these women writers, Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self (2019) and Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations: Reflections from Life (2019), as innovative explorations of identity by applying Michael Bamberg’s integrative approach of narrative analysis. It aims to illuminate these examples of essayism as ‘interactional and bodily performed’ narratives, in Bamberg’s words, and as testimonies of transformation and adaptation of the body-mediated selves not only in Ireland, but universally. Pine and Gleeson’s essays look back on painful past experiences and explore the intersection of identity, textuality, and the body.