The accretion of Anglo-Irish identity around the symbolic locus of the ‘Big House’ is in many respects a distraction from any socio-economic reality, yet this tradition remains compelling within an Irish literary narrative. This chapter considers the deployment of the genre in relation to the work of Elizabeth Bowen, as it eventually becomes used as a motif through which to explore themes that could scarcely have been thought of when the original Ascendancy homes were built. It queries the accepted relationship between literary setting and social caste, and outlines fresh critical parameters for this recurrent idiom. Initially reviewing works such as Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down, published in 1966, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles (1970) and John Banville’s Birchwood (1973), the first part of the chapter argues that these writers reinvigorated Big House fiction through stylish interventions in language and a thematic turn towards metafiction. It then discusses how in the 1970s, under the impact of revisionism, events in the North and the growth of feminism, Jennifer Johnston and Caroline Blackwood reinvented the Big House narrative of Anglo-Irish decline, subverting and parodying the conventions of a genre that until then had seemed stable and familiar.

The Nineteenth-Century Tale

Any account of the Irish short story would be incomplete without some reference to its predecessor, the nineteenth-century tale. The 1800 Act of Union stimulated English interest in this part of their empire and depictions of Irish life and customs, collections of folklore and travelogues, often presented in quasi-fictional form, became immensely popular in the first decades of the nineteenth century. However, just as the Irish state had still to come into being, so the Irish short story had yet to stabilize as a genre. ‘Tale’ in the nineteenth century could mean anything from a brief sketch, anecdote or fable to a novella or even a three-volume novel. Much of the short fiction in this period was used for extra-literary purposes as Protestant and Catholic writers were propelled by their anxiety to defend and explain the Irish to the English and to record the beliefs and habits of Irish peasant life before they vanished forever. Under pressure from the turbulent times in Ireland, the realistic framework of the fiction often collapsed into gothic or melodrama, sentimentality or didactics.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century Anglo-Irish writers like Maria Edgeworth and Anna Hall published tales designed to instruct English readers in an understanding of the Irish way of life, essential if the Anglo-Irish were to govern Ireland effectively. Their didactic, though lively, tales were thus implicated in the imperial project. Other writers from the Protestant tradition, such as Thomas Crofton Croker (Fairy Tales and Legends of the South of Ireland, 1825) and Samuel Lover (Legends and Stories of Ireland, 1832), drew on oral storytelling and Irish folklore for the amusement of their English readers. Lover aimed to reproduce the lively tones of an Irish storyteller but undermined this by framing it with the voice of an educated, highly condescending narrator.

Catholic writers John and Michael Banim took exception to these portrayals of the Irish peasant as buffoon. In their Tales of the O'Hara Family (first series, 1825) they aimed for serious portraits of contemporary rural hardship and thereby came nearer to bringing a national literature into being.

The Irish Short Story Mid-Century

Two writers, Frank O'Connor and Seán O'Faoláin, played an important part in establishing the short story as the quintessential Irish literary form in the middle of the twentieth century. The previous chapter highlighted O'Faoláin's influential role as editor of The Bell (1940–6), which gave him the opportunity both through his comments on the short story form and through publishing such authors as Frank O'Connor, Bryan MacMahon, James Plunkett, Mary Lavin, Sam Hanna Bell, Mary Beckett and Michael McLaverty, to mould the Irish short story of this period. O'Faoláin's views on what the modern short story should be were incorporated into his study, The Short Story (1948), where he endeavoured to distinguish the modern short story from the loosely structured tale of oral tradition by associating the short story with concision, irony and open-endedness and stressing that the modern short story differed from the tale or anecdote in being chiefly ‘an adventure of the mind’. In his view, the modern short story achieved its best effects through suggestion and implication: the influence of Chekhov on the Irish short story was still much in evidence.

O'Faoláin's own stories from this period, in Teresa and Other Stories (1947) and The Finest Stories (1957), display an uneven application of his theories of what the modern short story should be doing: rather than focusing on psychological exploration, many of them are taken up by satirizing aspects of Irish life. Frank O'Connor described Irish literature in these years as being ‘diverted’ by the realities of Irish life, and stories such as ‘The Man Who Invented Sin’ express O'Faoláin's barely contained resentment against the claustrophobic nature of Irish life and the role of the Catholic Church in hampering individual fulfilment. The comedy of a story such as ‘Unholy Living and Half Dying’ does not disguise the fact that mid-century Ireland is as much a place of stagnation and paralysis as it was in the stories of Moore and Joyce. In ‘Lady Lucifer’, three representatives of the intelligentsia, a priest, a bank clerk and a doctor, debate whether they should stay in a country where so many lead lives of quiet despair.

In 1887, Madame Blavatsky arrived in London to publicize her occult philosophy, a heady mix of Neo-Platonism, Buddhism, and Kabbalistic mysticism. Despite accusations of fraud from the Society for Psychical Research, Helena Blavatsky's Theosophical Society flourished, reflecting the renewed interest in spiritualism in the 1880s. Reacting against the rise of Darwinism and a society increasingly devoted to scientific and technological progress, spiritualism developed as a counter-cultural movement in which women were dominant as teachers and mediums. Annie Besant, lampooned by Virginia Woolf in The Waves (1931), is just one example of someone who combined campaigning for women's rights with active involvement in the Theosophical Society. The alliance of spirituality and feminism was empowering, as is evidenced in the work of New Woman writers at the turn of the century, when writers like Sarah Grand and George Egerton took up the theme of women's superior spiritual powers in fiction that foreshadows the modernist aesthetic with its emphasis on dreams, the subconscious, and formal stylistic experimentation. Egerton's short stories in Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894) resist social constructs of femininity, allying women instead with nature, the primitive, and the spiritual in a way that anticipates the work of female modernists. Her writing reveals distaste for organized religion, particularly the Irish Catholicism of her youth, and her argument that women's maternity privileges them over men anticipates Jane Harrison's influential work on early matriarchal civilizations.

The Irish short story has been read, debated and lectured about to generations of students. A study by Deborah Averill, The Irish Short Story from George Moore to Frank O'Connor, came out in 1982, while two important collections of essays have been devoted to the subject: The Irish Short Story, edited by Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown, published in 1979, and The Irish Short Story, edited by James Kilroy, published in 1984. In recent years there have been as well many studies of the short stories of individual authors like James Joyce, Mary Lavin, John McGahern, William Trevor, Bryan MacMahon and others. Irish practitioners of the art, notably Seán O'Faoláin and Frank O'Connor, have written influential studies of the form, and there have been volumes devoted to the Irish short story in particular contexts, such as Michael Storey's Representing the Troubles in Irish Short Fiction (2004). We think we know very well what the modern Irish short story is, to the extent that another overview may well seem redundant.

Yet for a form often regarded, particularly in relation to the novel, as the pre-eminent Irish prose form, this handful of studies is numerically small. Even in Ireland, short fiction has been relegated to the margins of critical discourse, the short stories of major short story writers like Elizabeth Bowen treated as minor or apprentice pieces in comparison with their novels.

‘This place is a backwater’, grumbles one of Olivia Manning's characters. Isolation is a key theme in the Irish short story of this period, it being the widespread view of Irish fiction writers that the Second World War, or the Emergency as it was known in Ireland, had the effect of making an already inward-looking society even more isolated from the rest of the world. This was not necessarily the whole story. As Clair Wills has argued in That Neutral Island, Ireland's isolation paradoxically allowed for a new vitality in Irish culture. Neutrality encouraged the development of Irish artistic and cultural life as wartime censorship kept out rival foreign material. The number of art exhibitions and theatrical performances increased during this period and the indigenous film industry was given a boost due to restrictions on imports of foreign films. Moreover, the influx of refugees from Europe included artists, musicians and poets, swelling the ranks of Dublin's intelligentsia and giving the city a more cosmopolitan feel. Nevertheless, the view of Ireland's wartime writers, cosmopolitan and often European in outlook, was that neutrality had increased Ireland's isolation from the rest of the world.

If the modern Irish short story has frequently been concerned with identities in transition, it is interesting to observe that short narratives dealing with Irish themes began to emerge in the nineteenth century in large numbers at a time when the country was going through one of its most traumatic periods. The attempt by Irish Protestants to define themselves as a nation ended with the failure of Grattan's Parliament, and a series of events during the course of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Act of Union in 1800 and including Catholic emancipation (1829), the tithe wars, the famines and the 1848 rebellion, weakened the moral and political claim of the Ascendancy to rule Ireland. The tales of a writer like Sheridan Le Fanu reveal the anxiety induced by this loss of prestige. At the same time, the efforts of Catholics to establish a nation-state were beginning: in the 1820s Daniel O'Connell, aided by the Catholic Association, was orchestrating a mass movement to demand rights for the Catholic population. In order to make progress with this, O'Connell believed that Ireland needed to abandon the Irish language and learn the language of the country's administrators. Short fiction dealing with Irish themes started to proliferate at the moment when the Irish language and the oral tradition were being jettisoned in favour of English and the printed word. Research has highlighted the enormous implications of this shift from oral culture to print, not only for social structures, but also for patterns of thought.