Eighty years ago, on April 30th, 1941, the Anglo-Irish writer Ethel Colburn Mayne died in Torquay following injuries sustained during the London Blitz. In the late 1920s, Mayne’s fiction output waned, due to the strain of having to care for her elderly father and invalid sister. In the absence of major critics or writers championing her work, Mayne quickly fell between the cracks of literary history. Nor has Mayne’s work been recovered in more recent years as part of the Irish tradition of women’s writing. Like the short fiction of George Egerton, Mayne’s early stories aim to challenge the view of femininity put forward by male writers.

Source: The Irish Times May 26, 2021 04:52 UTC