Born in Waterford in Teresa Deevy (1894-1963) made no claims to being a political radical, a feminist, or a social revolutionary: and yet she was all of these things. Her plays, particularly those written for the Abbey in the 1930s imagine into life a cast of characters who must negotiate and survive, often with great difficulty and distress, the ever decreasing freedoms available in 1930s Ireland. The stories that Deevy created around her female characters’ experiences are uniquely luminescent in their evocation of female desire, frustration and repression. Taking The King of Spain’s Daughter (1935) and Wife to James Whelan (1941) as core texts this lecture considered the social and cultural ideologies underpinning the fabric of the newly founded Free State prior to the articulation of the 1937 Constitution
Period
08 Mar 2018
Held at
Wexford Library Service, Wexford County Council, Ireland