From Regional Remembrance to Transatlantic Heritage: The Transportability of Famine Memory in Fiction by Mary Anne Sadlier, Anna Dorsey, and Alice Nolan

This chapter examines Famine fiction by women writers who contributed extensively to the literary landscape of the Irish Famine diaspora: Mary Anne Sadlier’s New Lights (1853) and Elinor Preston (1861); Alice Nolan’s The Byrnes of Glengoulah (1868); and Anna Dorsey’s Nora Brady’s Vow (1869). These women writers’ narratives construct the Famine as a transferable legacy that is significant for the identity formation of Irish North-American communities. Sites of recollection—ruins in particular—function as screens of Famine trauma: they symbolize the suffering of the Famine-stricken rural and Catholic locals, and more specifically the extinction of the regional population and its culture by wide-scale starvation, disease, and the mass exodus following upon the Famine calamities. The represented lieux de mémoire in Ireland additionally play a central role in the development of the characters’ Irish transatlantic identities, while the narratives also suggest the transportability of such memory sites to the new territories of settlement.