7 - Gendered Entanglements
from Part II - The Ryanair Generation
Summary
Margaret Mulvihill is one of the few Irish women writers to have written consistently about the experiences of the post-war Irish in Britain. Her three novels are all period pieces set in London in the 1980s and early 1990s and her characterizations of young Irish migrants from this time mirror some of the satirical observations in earlier work by Anthony Cronin and Donall Mac Amhlaigh. However, for Mulvihill, who was born in Dublin in 1954 and came to London in her twenties, her perspective on the subject of migration was also imbued with a pronounced feminist sensibility. Apart from being a rare example of a writer from this time who explored Irish feminist issues in the context of migration, Mulvihill anticipated a genre of comic fiction about Irish women's experiences in London which writers such as Lana Citron, Marian Keyes and Anne Enright would develop in later years. In this chapter, I focus on her first two novels, Natural Selection (1985) and Low Overheads (1987), which deal more fully with questions of London Irish identity than her third.
Mulvihill's London Irish protagonists serve as vehicles for interrogating the experiences of the Ryanair generation in London and also as effective foils for the author's wry observations on the society within which they settled. Mulvihill uses satire to point up the ways in which personal shortcomings are graphically exposed by events beyond the control of individuals.
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- London Irish FictionsNarrative, Diaspora and Identity, pp. 103 - 117Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012