From her earliest awareness of herself as a writer, Eavan Boland defined her identity as an Irish woman. “Even now, my parents seem to me perfectly Irish, completely of their time and place”, Boland wrote in her 2011 collection A Journey with Two Maps (Boland, A Journey with Two Maps, 27). As an aspiring young student and poet in Dublin in the 1960s, Boland was drawn to a traditional vision of Irish literary life, “imagining myself there” as “I loved that narrative with its irresistible mix of dark violence and Victorian sentiment” (Boland, Object Lessons, 62/63). The inducement to “write in that cursive and approved script can seem, for the unwary …
3482 words
Citation: Lewis, Leon. "Eavan Boland". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 July 2020 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5517, accessed 07 October 2024.]