Introduction

Summary

Irish author Eleanor Norah Hoult (1898– 1984) moved in prominent literary circles and corresponded actively with some of the leading Irish authors of her time, including James Stephens, Brigid Brophy, Sean O'Casey, and Sean O'Faolain. Oliver St John Gogarty sent poems and sketches to Hoult; he bemoaned that it was ‘a damned shame that the most realistic woman writer living only can get a £100 in advance subject to their damned Federal Tax’. Sean O'Faolain wrote in 1936 to congratulate Hoult on her novel Holy Ireland, observing that he ‘admire[d] the strength of it […] and the sympathy of it’. Critics today are often equally positive: they compare her not only to short story writers O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, but also to novelists Kate O'Brien and Edna O'Brien for the insight of her work into the lives of women and the influence of the Catholic Church.

Despite her reputation and a 44- year publishing career, Hoult's oeuvre remains surprisingly neglected. She is generally recognized as a significant twentieth- century Irish author – yet reference to Hoult and to her work is often limited to indexes, biographical dictionaries and anthologies. The need for a sustained critical and academic engagement with Hoult's canon remains.

This edition seeks to rectify that critical oversight by introducing Hoult's short story collection Poor Women! to a new generation of readers. Called Hoult's ‘best- known and most widely admired work’, Poor Women! was nonetheless rejected 19 times before its acceptance and publication in 1928 by Scholartis Press in London. Yet its release was marked by almost immediate critical acclaim: the 1929 American edition featured an ‘Open Letter’ from H. M. Tomlinson, who noted that ‘there is no doubt, if she continues to write, that she is likely to be freely named whenever the best fiction is discussed’. Poor Women! displays Hoult's subtlety and humour as an author and her nature as a keen witness to human frailty – perhaps the combination of ‘strength’ and ‘sympathy’ to which O'Faolain would refer. Hoult sketches her characters in all their flawed humanity, thus creating individuals ‘whose thoughts and language inspire both the reader's sympathy and a sharp awareness of their limitations’. This remains one of the most commented- upon aspects of her writing.