Laura Kennedy: If my granny saw me reading a novel, she’d tell me to do something useful

My grandmother would come at you with a rolling pin if you crossed her. In her defence, crossing her really didn’t take much. She made a very good apple tart, so occasionally she’d actually have a valid reason to wield the rolling pin. Generally, it was merely the chosen weapon of a generation of Irish women who were pathologically suspicious of other females – particularly girls. Read a novel in her presence and she’d immediately look visibly pained, trying to get you to do something useful instead. She’d be chivvying and fussing as though you were engaging in some highly indecorous transgression. Her face would arrange into an “anything but this” expression. “Do something of value,” the face urged. “Scrub something or retrieve something or peel vegetables.” While all female leisure was questionable and self-indulgent, male leisure was mostly fine – or perhaps my grandmother just felt more powerless to stop it. A grandson reading a book or watching television was an unfortunate inevitability – you could expect no better of a male person than the inborn inclination to recreate himself. Still, there was little that bothered my grandmother more than what she perceived as feminine idleness. She was a woman of her time – wholly domestic, entirely guarded and deeply suspicious of any indication of interiority or pleasure. “Having a nice time reading your little novel on the couch? Well now, you’re not. Hup out of it and don’t be getting ideas about yourself. Notions... Peel a spud. Beat a rug with a stick. Mop a floor. Drag the wet purple giblets out of a dead chicken’s aperture in your pinched fist.” READ MOREThis is the fire in which many Irish women I know were forged – emerging adamantine from the excoriating flames of matriarchal suspicion. It’s why I find the PR shift in perception of the Irish Woman this last decade or so utterly bemusing.In Ireland, an Irish woman is just considered a woman. There are loads of us. The streets are muffled with our footfall as we march about in thermal socks and a sensible waterproof shoe as autumn shuffles damply in. We condole with one another over the older women in our families who can’t sit down for three minutes together, and keep everyone around them nervous and surveilled. We know what an Irish woman is, and what she has evolved from. In London or Sydney or New York, an Irish woman is now apparently broadly considered some manner of Sally Rooney-type. Articulate and thoughtful. Possibly politically engaged, chicly troubled, and wearing natural fibres. Rooney has come to represent the interiority of the Irish woman as she’s envisaged internationally – a ponderous creative. An intellectual. The sort of woman who might contribute minimally to dinner table conversation but unselfconsciously reveal herself to be frighteningly well-read with every sparse utterance.Of course, some Irish women are like this. Some women almost everywhere are like this. It seems, however, that Irish female interiority is a currency now. To be an Irish woman outside Ireland (provided you’re not just instantly mistaken for British – an error Americans are very prone to) is to be mysterious, interesting, and maybe even French-adjacent somehow. When did that happen? There remains a broad gap between the exported conception of the softly spoken intellectual Irish woman and the reality of how most Irish women actually liveRooney was of course not the first to do it, and wouldn’t claim to be. Edna O’Brien infuriated my grandmother’s generation by exposing the inner workings of a female mind to the light of an Irish day in her writing. People lost their minds when O’Brien let loose her own. It’s easy to forget the subversive bravery of this now, when the median contemporary Irish voice, even in non-fiction, is the voice of a woman – usually a middle-class, university-educated woman. Dublin is crumbling under the weight of female essayists and memoirists and fiction writers. It is easy to forget that there is a cultural dominance and force to the Irish woman’s experience that is explored in so many of the most successful books of our day. Women writers are pouring forth from Ireland and into the global consciousness – Anne Enright, Claire Keegan and Caroline O’Donoghue, for instance. [ Compelling and unsettling: The Last Years of Edna O’Brien by her son Carlo GéblerOpens in new window ]My grandmother would come at you with a rolling pin for your notions. She was like a puritanical 18th-century critic worried about a novel’s capacity to corrupt a young woman’s mind by showing her worlds outside the only one she was permitted to consider. But now the Irish female experience is a marketable commodity. It is an export, like Kerrygold butter – so successful an export that it is shifting how we are perceived internationally. It’s another evolution of the conversation Irish people have been conducting among themselves for generations. Questioning what kind of interior life – and whose – is valuable, interesting, worthy of export. A live debate on which voices are worth hearing; which testimonies are considered valuable or relevant. There remains a broad gap between the exported conception of the softly spoken intellectual Irish woman and the reality of how most Irish women actually live. It is fascinating how this public image has somehow shifted within a couple of generations from the Irish woman as a passive, restricted mother-of-seven chivvying a legion of grubby children to some manner of public intellectual or high-end creative. At home, we are not forced to live within the restrictive contours of our grandmothers’ lives – and thank goodness for it. Yet, still in our culture, that watchfulness remains. That sense of needing permission as though there’s a furious person with a rolling pin looking on just out of sight. The fear of having “notions”. That’s always been the way. One rule at home, another abroad.