All Reputation

Hermione Lee

• The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright
  Cape, 230 pp, £12.99, September 2002, ISBN 0 224 06269 7
• Clara by Janice Galloway
  Cape, 425 pp, £10.99, June 2002, ISBN 0 224 05049 4

Both these outstanding women novelists have decided, with deliberate and rewarding feminist intent, to resuscitate and make central the lives of women whose stories have been overshadowed by the men they spent their lives with. Both have placed so-called women’s subject-matter – domestic details, clothes, female bodies, sexuality and pleasure, pregnancy and childbirth – at the centre of their very physical narratives. Both have re-created a national culture and a history quite foreign to them, mid 19th-century Paraguay and Germany. In doing so, both have deliberately loosened their ties with their roots. Janice Galloway gets even further away from Glasgow than Rona and Cassie did in her very good novel Foreign Parts, and uses a quite different kind of prose here from her earlier work. Anne Enright moves out and away from Dublin, though Eliza Lynch’s Irishness, and her childhood in the ‘bitter town’ of Mallow, do call her home. Both take on the fiction writer’s tussle with history and biography, shaping these real lives to their own ends.