From the Big Bad Wolf in County Kerry to the Little Mermaid in the depths of Lough Neagh, Ireland’s 19th-century women writers engaged in oft-times playful and humorous revisions of European fairy tales and folklore, but also – and more soberly – interrogated the social and literary conventions of the Victorian fairy tale within Irish socio-cultural disquiet. While fairy tale literature has long been recognised in Victorian culture as a site of literary production that reflected broader adult anxieties and social concerns, 19th-century Irish women writers of the genre have been little considered within these contexts. This seminar attempts to redress this gap through a critical reading of Rosa Mulholland’s ‘The Girl From Under the Lake’ (1881), a significant revision of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837). Transposing Andersen’s tale of female love and self-sacrifice to the shores of Ireland, this paper explores how Mulholland’s fairy tale becomes a site of challenge to both colonial rule in late 19th-century Ireland, as well as the gendered conventions that condemn Andersen’s original female protagonist to her tragic fate.

Dr Anne Jamison is a graduate of St Andrews and QUB and has held posts at Ulster University, the University of Limerick and the Institute of Irish Studies at QUB. She is currently Associate Professor in English, as well as Deputy Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre, at the University of Western Sydney in Australia. She is author of E. OE. Somerville and Martin Ross; Female Authorship and Literary Collaboration (2016) and is currently working on a book-length project on Irish women's fantasy and fairy tale writing in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Image: Watercolour in Edith Somerville,  Growly-Wowly (c.1880), QUB Special Collections MS 17/802