Writing Women's Lives & History
b"How do we write the history of women\\u2019s lives when history itself has hidden them? In this International Women\\u2019s Day episode of the History Workshop Podcast, Christopher Kissane speaks to the Irish poet and writer Doireann n\\xed Ghr\\xedofa about her book 'A Ghost in the Throat', winner of the An Post Irish National Book of the Year and the Foyle\\u2019s Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The book weaves together the stories of two women, separated by centuries: Doireann\\u2019s experiences as a young mother in twenty-first century Ireland, and the lost life of the poet Eibhl\\xedn Dubh n\\xed Chonaill, whose lament for her murdered husband, Caoineadh Airt u\\xed Laoghaire, has been described as the greatest Irish poem of the eighteenth-century. Finding Eibhl\\xedn Dubh\\u2019s story repeatedly obscured by her famous male relatives and an \\u2018academic gaze [that swiftly] places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives\\u2019, Doireann searches for the poet\\u2019s life with \\u2018the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university\\u2019. Through research and imagination, between dropping her children to school and putting them to bed, she constructs a very different history. \\u2018This\\u2019, the book begins, \\u2018is a female text\\u2019."