Dublin Core
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Subject
Freda Laughton (1907-1995) was born in Bristol and moved to Co. Down after her marriage. She published one collection of poetry A Transitory House (Jonathan Cape, 1945), little else is known of her life and work. She may have lived in Dublin for some time, as her poem The Welcome details the textures of Dublin City and its suburbs, and suggests she knows the city by heart. Freda Laughton’s poems were submitted by Emma Penney, a graduate of the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College Dublin. Her thesis, Now I am a Tower of Darkness: A Critical History of Poetry by Women in Ireland, challenges the critical reception of Eavan Boland and the restrictive criteria, developed in the 1970’s, under which poetry by women in Ireland has been assessed. She considers the subversive nature of women’s poetry written between 1921 and 1950, and calls into question the critical assumption that Eavan Boland represents “the first serious attempt in Ireland to make a body of poems that arise out of the contemporary female consciousness”. In Object Lessons, Boland concluded that there were no women poets before her who communicated “an expressed poetic life” in their work. Emma’s thesis reveals how this view has permeated the critical landscape of women’s poetry, facilitating an absurd privation of the history of poetry by women in Ireland and simplifying it in the process.
(Biographical Source: Emma Penney)
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References
Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970 edited by Dr Lucy Collins
Copyright Date: 2012
Published by: Liverpool University Press
Citation: Collins, Lucy, editor. Poetry by Women in Ireland: A Critical Anthology 1870–1970. Liverpool University Press, 2012.
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Now I am a Tower of Darkness: A Critical History of Poetry by Women in Ireland, Emma Penney
"Now I am a tower of Darkness; Emerging Genealogies" by Walt Hunter published Jacket2 Magazine
Online URL: http://jacket2.org/commentary/now-i-am-tower-darkness
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Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon
RASCAL (Research And Special Collections Available Locally)
Online URL: http://www.rascal.ac.uk/institutions/fired-irish-women-poets-and-canon
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"Now I am a Tower of Darkness", "The Welcome", "The Woman with Child", by Freda Laughton (1907- 1995) published online, Poethead, 27/09/2014
Online URL: https://poethead.wordpress.com/2014/09/27/now-i-am-a-tower-of-darkness-and-other-poems-by-freda-laughton/
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Description
Online URL: https://poethead.wordpress.com/2014/09/27/now-i-am-a-tower-of-darkness-and-other-poems-by-freda-laughton/