The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women by Sally Barr Ebest Page A

contemporary, Kathleen Coyle, who was born in Derry,
    worked as an editor in London, and later emigrated to America, was of a sim-
    ilar mindset (Ulster History Circle). A suffragist, she divorced her husband
    after four years and took up writing to earn money. Coyle wrote thirteen
    novels, among them The Widow’s House (1924), Youth in the Saddle (1927),
    It Is Better to Tell (1928), A Flock of Birds (1930), The French Husband
    (1932), Family Skeleton (1934), Undue Fulfi llment (1934), Immortal Ease
    (1941), Morning Comes Early (1934), and a memoir, The Magical Realm
    (1943) (culturenorthernireland.org 2008). Using stream of consciousness (a
    method perhaps emulating her friend James Joyce’s approach in Ulysses ), A
    Flock of Birds conveys a woman’s jumbled thoughts while she worries about
    her imprisoned son’s fate: she hates childbirth yet bears children, she longs
    to engage in sexual intimacy without losing oneself, and she enjoys the com-
    pany of other women who despise their husbands. Also writing during this
    period was Kay Boyle, who published more than forty books, including four-
    teen novels that explored power differentials in male-female relationships.
    Yet another relatively obscure Irish American writer, the Scots-Irish Bernice
    Kelly Harris, developed the Irish penchant for satire in plays, short stories,
    and seven novels about family life. Sweet Beulah Land (1943) is perhaps her
    best-known work.
    Labor activist and journalist Dorothy Day also began publishing during
    this period. Early in her career she worked for the Socialist newspaper The
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    Call and then moved on to The Masses , where she served as a reporter. When
    The Masses was closed down after dubious charges of espionage (based on
    their antiwar cartoons and editorials), she left journalism and entered nurs-
    ing school. Seven years later, drawing on these experiences she published an
    autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin (1924). A co-founder of The
    Catholic Worker , Day was a lifelong activist, ultimately publishing over one
    thousand articles as well as Houses of Hospitality (1939), which recounted the
    founding of the Catholic Worker ; The Long Loneliness (1952), an autobiogra-
    phy; and On Pilgrimage: The Sixties (1972) (Simkin).
    But all of these writers pale in comparison to Margaret Mitchell. Chris-
    topher Dowd maintains that Gone With the Wind “is one of the most sig-
    nifi cant and popular works by an Irish American woman. . . . Mitchell
    offered a unique female voice and created a female character that appealed
    to Irish American women in a way that a character like Studs Lonigan never
    could. . . . [A]ny study of Irish American literature that ignores the impor-
    tance of Gone With the Wind is missing one of the biggest pieces of the puz-
    zle. . . . In rewriting the story of Irish America, Mitchell established one of
    the most enduring myths of post-immigrant Irish identity” (2010, 174–75).
    Scarlett’s ethnic roots are reinforced throughout the novel. Her father
    tells her she cannot escape her “Irish blood,” Rhett Butler characterizes her
    temper as getting her “Irish up,” and neighbors refer to her as “highfl ying,
    bogtrotting Irish,” while Atlanta’s society mavens dismiss her as an “Irish
    peasant” (Mitchell 1937, 39, 195, 528, 89). Scarlett sees herself as more
    than this, and as a second-generation immigrant, she is. Her temperament
    represents an amalgamation of positive and negative Irish traits, accurately
    depicting the contradictory nature of Irish Americans (Dowd 2010, 175).
    Scarlett’s character also personifi es aspects of Mitchell herself. Better
    known as a novelist than an Irish American, Margaret Mitchell was the
    daughter of the Irish Catholic suffragist Mary Fitzgerald Mitchell, who co-
    founded what eventually