As the title suggests, Heather Ingman's book focuses on the relationship between nation and gender in Ireland, a problematic issue when looking at any century of Irish literature. Divided into seven chapters plus a conclusion, the text covers an amazing number of novels, including the work of well-known authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin, Jennifer Johnston, and Edna O’Brien and promising writers like Mary Leland, Kate O’Riordan, Deirdre Madden, Éilís Ní Duhuibhne, and Mary Morrissy. Using primarily Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytical theory, Ingman serves up a reading of over twenty women writers. There is always a risk of myopia in applying a particularized literary theory to a body of literature, but Ingman ably takes on the challenge. The benefit of her success is fresh insight into familiar readings. If the book sometimes seems to be an introduction to Kristeva as much as a literary study, it does make this fiction accessible and interesting in both theoretical apparatus and textual analyses. In the end, Ingman's consistent, intelligent examination and Kristevan application validate its approach.

Citing “Kristeva's analysis of women as strangers and exiles within the life of the nation” (8), Ingman positions female characters in an Ireland where women's identities atrophy under institutional and cultural subjugation and marginalization. Through detailed study of both texts and themes, Ingman argues that gender oppression was more detrimental to Irish nationhood and culture than colonial and postcolonial religious, political, and economic discrimination and persecution. At the same time, Ingman posits “applying Kristeva's analysis to Irish women it follows that, from their position on the margins of the nation, Irish women have the opportunity to use their voices to subvert entrenched Irish nationalism and open it up to a more fluid identity” (49). Ingman explores these ideas within an interwoven web of fiction from both the Republic and Northern Ireland. One more integral Kristevan concept that “every society is founded on the abject, that which has to be suppressed in order for national identity to emerge” (67) underscores Ingman's revelation that change in these fictional women's lives comes very slowly, if at all, and almost never within the confines of Ireland itself. Like James Joyce's ethic that a soul must flee Ireland to breathe and grow, she discovers that most women characters must flee both their mothers and Ireland, the motherland, to develop positive identities.

Ingman's introduction, also the first chapter, is a litany of the canon of feminist scholarly criticism in Ireland. Besides Kristeva, she refers to key feminist writers—Ann Owen Weeks, Eavan Boland, as well as canonical Elaine Showalter, Virginia Woolf, and bell hooks. She retraces Irish women's political situations that affected their freedom to work and be educated. Each tightly constructed chapter includes an introduction and then breaks down into discussions of specific novels relating to a particular topic: religion, nationalism, transnationalism, sexuality, spirituality. Although earlier writers are well covered, her discussions focus more on late twentieth-century writers, especially Jennifer Johnston. This body of fiction is filled with violent fathers, married lovers, suffocating mothers, and estranged daughters. Repression, oppression, and limitations to gender-specific roles become familiar themes. The narratives often end unhappily and even fatally. Suicide becomes nearly ubiquitous. Subsumed by nationalism, Catholicism, and maternalism, the female characters’ identities usually disintegrate in this withering environment.

Ingman's chapter “Reclaiming the Mother in the Mother-Daughter Story” provides useful examples of the way she applies Kristeva's theory. In these stories, the daughter's responsibility to separate from but maintain maternal ties while building healthy identities demands empowered role models. Seeing their mothers in such undesirable situations, young women must flee or suffocate, which undermines female bonds while simultaneously strengthening the patriarchy. Ingman cites Molly Keane's works in particular, claiming “the novel as a whole endorses the view of mother as abject, someone who is best grown out of” (76). In a culture that epitomizes the Catholic concept of Mary's selflessness and virtue, women are forced to hold themselves to an impossible standard and thus dehumanize themselves. These cultural standards are not limited to Catholic women. For example, Ingman goes on to discuss Jennifer Johnston's novel The Christmas Tree, where the Protestant protagonist Constance “has to resist her mother's influence in order to become a successful mother herself” (77). Kristeva's concept of abjection pervades Edna O’Brien's novels and Mary Lavin's short stories as well. As Ingman points out, the daughter's and mother's inabilities to understand each other in Lavin's “A Cup of Tea” are a result of her college education's exiling her from her mother's domestic world. Ingman does mention a few novels where mother-daughter relationships are productive and healthy. Kate Cruise O’Brien, Jessica Benjamin, and Jennifer Johnston all wrote fiction that shows promising female relationships.

Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women is not easy to read, but it is well worth the effort. Its heavily Kristevan approach might limit its usefulness to the general literary audience, but the theorists among us will find her application useful and interesting. Ingman's writing is clear and graceful as well, and her story summaries never intrude on her analyses. Today's scholars and students will benefit from research like Ingman’s, which promotes Ireland's heterogeneity, especially in the current economic and social explosion. Her study provides a valuable addition toward building an Irish women writers canon.