‘Perfect in her own perfection’: Women Writers in The Bell

Abstract

This essay examines the role played by magazine culture in the exclusion of women writers from the traditional Irish short story canon by looking at the presence and representation of women writers in The Bell (1940–1954), Ireland’s most influential mid-twentieth century literary periodical. The magazine did much to promote aspiring short story writers, but was less willing to perform their role as cultivator of new talent typical of periodical publication when it came to women apprentices. The first part of the essay gives a general picture of women’s presence in the magazine. The second part probes the underlying assumptions with have led to the systematic curtailment of women writers, and the final section maps the wider impact of these processes on the short story canon in Ireland. Despite The Bell’s progressive and inclusive credentials, the magazine proved to be an uncongenial place for women writers: with its masculine rhetoric, its representation of authorship as a male preserve, its persistent othering of women writers, its foregrounding of male experience in its fiction, and the effects of male gatekeeping, The Bell uncritically reflected and reproduced the rigid binary divisions that separated male and female spheres in Irish society at large, and ultimately contributed to the marginalization of women writers in the short story canon in Ireland.