What Made Them Leave?

Abstract

Almost coinciding with the prosperity of the Celtic Tiger economic story of success, recent decades have witnessed how politicians, scholars, and writers started to vindicate the contributions of the Irish diaspora and, by extension, those of Irish emigrant women in the construction of Mother Ireland. The chapter attempts to illustrate how the contemporary Irish short story written during these years was depicting disheartening or happy-ending stories about emigration, exile, and return, being at times regressive in its outlooks, and at times setting the stories of their heroines in the here and now. Here, due to the readings of these creative works, a more nuanced picture of Irish women's emigration is offered and this goes beyond the conceptualizations of those women who left the Irish shores as vulnerable, ignorant, poor, pregnant, or sexually deviant, while the phenomenon of immigration itself is understood in relation to variables such as class, age, education, nationality, and religion.