Kathleen Ferguson

Life
1958- ; [Kathleen Bernadette Ferguson], b. Tamnaherin, Co. Derry; ed. Mullabuoy Primary Sch., Thornhill Grammar Sch., and University of Ulster (Coleraine); grad. BA, 1980; DPhil, 1986, with “Narrative Voice in Dickens”]; published The Maid’s Tale (1994), dealing with the exploitation of Brigid, a woman from a violent family background, raised in an orphanage and abused by the parish priest Fr. Mann whose housekeeper she becomes; winner of Irish Times Fiction Award, 1995; taught at University of Ulster; partner with John McVeagh, a Defoe specialist and 17th c. scholar; m. and living in Italy.

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Works
The Maid’s Tale (Dublin: Torc/Poolbeg Press 1994), 202pp. German translation as Die Haushälterin (Zürich: Haffmans 1999).

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Criticism
Monographs
  • Eric P. Levy, ‘The Mastering of Selfhood in Kathleen Ferguson’s The Maid’s Tale’, in New Hibernia Review [University of St. Thomas], 8:1 (Earrach/Spring 2004),
    pp.93-106.
General studies
  • Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press 1997) [on The Maid’s Tale], pp.88-91. [see extract].
  • Linden Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2004) - Chap. 5: ‘Unspoken Desires’ [with Jennifer Johnston and Emma Donoghue].
  • J. F. Foster, The Cambridge Guide to the Irish Novel (Cambridge UP 2006), p.268f.

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Commentary
Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press 1997), ‘The novel shows Brigid becoming her own author, in effect her own god. Rather than having her life described in terms of other people or institutions, she tells her own story in her own words, thus reclaiming the sense of self which the Church had insisted she sacrifice. The Maid’s Tale is written in the form of an oral history, and Brigid’s resistance to patriarchal ideology is supported by the control she exerts over her own narrative. Telling the story of her life is an enabling act for Brigid, a way of affirming identity in the present. She insists en ordering her own life, allowing space to certain things while omitting others, employing her own idiom and her own perspectives to combat the weight of institutional discourse. The narrative ethos is one of the spoken rather than the written word. Brigid does not try to pretend that her version is objective or uninfluenced by her position in the present. This narrative is alive, and the reader is invoked throughout and invited to take an active part in the narrative process.’ (pp.88-91.)

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