| Title | ‘It Is Myself I Seen in Her’ |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Points of Departure in Teresa Deevy’s The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) |
| Contributor | Willy Maley(author) |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0432.07 |
| Landing page | https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0432/chapters/10.11647/obp.0432.07 |
| License | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
| Copyright | Willy Maley; |
| Publisher | Open Book Publishers |
| Published on | 2025-04-07 |
| Long abstract | Despite the excellent efforts of recent scholars such as Gerardine Meaney, Cathy Leeney, and Úna Kealy, criticism of Teresa Deevy is still at a relatively early stage, yet her work is as deserving of detailed attention, and as open to arguments over endings and intentions, as that of James Joyce. In this essay I take Joyce’s short story ‘Eveline’ (1904) and J. M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (1907) as jumping-off points for a discussion of Deevy’s dynamic one-act play The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) in order to explore the dreams of leaving entertained by women in the literature and drama of the period and the obstacles in their paths. Deevy’s work has been compared with that of Synge before, of course, but less so Joyce, and Joyce criticism arguably offers richer ways of thinking about the complexities of Deevy’s drama, and in particular the representation of women. Closer to home, for Deevy, Signe Toksvig’s essay, ‘Why Girls Leave Ireland’ (1929), provides a bridge into Deevy’s world, as Toksvig was a contemporary and correspondent of the dramatist, and she has fascinating things to say about the predicament of the likes of Annie Kinsella, the protagonist of The King of Spain’s Daughter, in a play where sisterhood and solidarity strive with solitude and subservience. |
| Page range | pp. 155–172 |
| Print length | 18 pages |
| Language | English (Original) |
Willy Maley taught at the University of Glasgow from 1994–2024. He has co-edited several essay collections on Irish literature and history, including Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), Celtic Connections: Irish-Scottish Relations and the Politics of Culture (Peter Lang, 2013), Romantic Ireland: From Tone to Gonne: Fresh Perspectives on Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), and Scotland and the Easter Rising: Fresh Perspectives on 1916 (Luath Press, 2016). He has published essays on a range of Irish writers from major modern authors like Beckett, Joyce, O’Casey, Synge, and Yeats to contemporary figures including Marina Carr and Martin McDonagh. He has authored two previous essays on Teresa Deevy: ‘“She Done Coriolanus at the Convent”: Empowerment and Entrapment in Teresa Deevy’s In Search of Valour’, Irish University Review, 49.2 (2019), and with Kirsty Lusk, ‘Drama Out of a Crisis: James Connolly’s Under Which Flag (1916) and Teresa Deevy’s The Wild Goose (1936)’, Irish Studies Review, 30.4 (2022).