Object lessons : the life of the woman and the poet in our time

Meditating on being a woman and a poet in modern Ireland, Eavan Boland recounts her early life in Dublin and London, and her later struggle to find a place and a voice in the heavily male literary culture of Ireland.

In prose, she talks about the challenges of speaking honestly and truly in a country where to be a woman (especially a suburban married woman with children) and a poet has seemed in the past a contradiction in terms. Boland's father was a distinguished diplomat, and she learned about Irish history in embassies and drawing-rooms; learned too that as a woman she was offered by her nation no active role to play.