The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland

‘’How many times have I re-cloaked myself over the centuries? Sometimes I’ve been feral and sharp-witted, other times, tame and homely. I have metamorphosed so often to suit each husband’s fantasy, I no longer know which version of myself is real.’’
The Seventh Man - Roisin O’Donnell

Northern Irish literature has a spirit all its own: vivid, direct, and unflinching. It doesn’t circle around emotion but faces it head-on, often with a morbid humour that sharpens rather than softens the blow. Beneath the wit, there is almost always sadness, a sense of lives lived under weight — of history, of silence, of loss. What makes it compelling is not lyrical flourishes or sentimentality, but the way grief, resilience, and show more truth-telling are layered together. These are stories that capture ordinary people in extraordinary clarity, never romanticized, never diluted, and all the more powerful for it.

This spirit becomes even clearer in the writings of women authors, who bring to the page not only the landscape but the soul of the land itself. Their stories hold the contradictions of the North of Ireland — faith and doubt, politics and silence, societal demands and private disappointments. From the domestic sphere to the public stage, they communicate how expectation collides with individuality, how resilience is forged in constraint. Through their voices, the truth that emerges is at once personal and collective.

The Mystery of Ora - Rosa Mulholland: The story of a mysterious beauty wondering in the cliffs and the caves, of moonlight and Occultism. Irish Gothic at its best with a proper Gothic heroine.

An Idealist - Ermina Rentoul Esler: A very short story of a young woman who was different from the pattern followed by the women in her village. A girl who tells it like it is, damns the consequences and goes on to become a famous writer.

Eugenia - Sarah Grand: A scoundrel thinks he is armed enough to trap a lively young woman into marrying him (as long as she doesn’t have ‘views’) What he doesn’t know - what many men don’t know - is that he is totally out of his depth. A story about the power of brainy women. Do not underestimate us.

The Hard that Once - ! - Alice Milligan: A young noble lady goes above and beyond to save her nurse’s rebel son. A bit naive, to be honest, but Mabel is such a brave girl…

‘’My darling, ‘tis the black world surely since you went away and left me here behind in sorrow.’’

The Coming of Maire Ban (All Souls’ Night) - Ethna Carbery: A husband is waiting for his dead wife to return on All Souls’ Night. However, another man comes to keep vigil with him, someone who loved her too, and this is a night of surprises. The story of a strange triangle. Very Gothic, very sad.

‘’They did not notice when the flowers died.’’

Village Without Men… - Margaret Barrington: A village is left to die when the husbands and lovers are drowned in a night of terrible storm. The midwife leaves, the young daughters depart. Only a young man remains who dares to fall in love with the new young teacher. This becomes the catalyst for a shocking event in a story that left me in awe with its intensity.

We should not be afraid of our desires, that’s all I’ll say…

The Girls - Janet McNeill: This one gave me much trouble. There is nothing worse than a woman trying to compete with every other woman in sight. And there is nothing ‘feminist’ in oppressing him to prevent infidelity. Irritating, as irritating as the attitude of many wives over the centuries.

Flags and Emblems - Mary Beckett: This story is so moving. During the time of the Troubles, a daughter finds herself thrown into the battle between her father and her brother, who chose to marry a Unionist. A reckless action of his wife causes the rift between the two men to grow even wider. Two voices in this haunting story - the girl who dreams of an escape. The wife who loves her husband but not enough to put her head together and think about right and wrong.

The Countess & Icarus - Polly Devlin: So, I found the dud. I am sure there must be an audience for such stories, but this one gave me a headache. Everyone sleeps with everyone, marriages, affairs. Irish, English, French, and somehow WWII is also involved.

Please, don’t use Greek myths in vain. I am offended.

‘’I serve God’, Clair corrected. ‘The God whose greatest gift is free will. But I will not serve your God.’’

The Devil’s Gift - Frances Molloy: The daughter of a Northern Irish family leaves home to become a nun. In a town where discrimination against Catholic men is ripe, where families are torn under the weight of a cruel reality, why would you inflict yourself with the hardship of living in a convent amidst creatures who have nothing to do with God? There is humility and there is cruelty.

I firmly believe that God gave us beautiful emotions to experience. He doesn’t want to suffocate ourselves behind erected walls. I am a Christian and this is my belief. End of story. This one is a masterpiece.

The Diary (An Everyday Fable) - Una Woods: A moving fable in which a man drowned in sadness and regrets of what could have been, writes in his diary, observed by a chorus of inanimate objects resting in a scrapyard, awaiting their reincarnation.

Capering Penguins - Sheila Llewellyn: A story about a man who has returned from the war, trying to make sense of the new world around him, and the aches that even a Penguin book cannot heal…

The Turn - Linda Anderson: Set in a hospital ward in Cambridge, the story moves back in time to Belfast before the ceasefires. Anna remembers her father and a young man who was murdered by the paramilitary.

‘’She has the power to give but also to take away. I don’t like her much. Watch out for her.’’

Cornucopia - Anne Devlin: The statues of Roman goddesses create havoc within a Northern Irish Catholic family in a story narrated by a woman who is strong, unafraid to demand what she wants, yet too hesitant to fight for it…

*Anne Devlin adapted Wuthering Heights in the 1992 masterpiece starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, directed by Peter Kosminsky, and I worship the ground she walks on.*

Disturbing Words - Evelyn Conlon: In the funeral of both parents, the narrator takes us on a journey to the life of a family living in a land wounded by a border, where you need to pass through a checkpoint to visit a friend. As if that weren’t enough, towns empty when the youth leave to pursue a different life. Written in vivid Northern Irish style.

The Path to Heaven - Mary O’Donnell: The friendship between an Irish woman and a woman from Poland prompts Lauren to educate herself on the relatively less-known horrors of the concentration camp in Sobibor and the hellish Path to Heaven that awaited the Jewish population. The story asks a big WHY? Why did the people who knew did nothing to help the innocent victims of the worst genocide ever known to our world?

The Negotiators - Annemarie Neary: Two women negotiators face the same dangers during the time of Housein’s fall.

No Other Place - Martina Devlin: Set in Omagh shortly before WWII, Devlin dedicates her story to Alice Milligan who contemplates hope and the past, William Butler Yeats and the fight for independence.

‘’It was on 2 November that Davey Black first saw the woman appear on the other side of Carlingford Street, look up at the mural and make the sign of the cross.’’

The Mural Painter - Rosemary Jenkinson: A romantic, haunting story of a mural painter oppressed by a deeply unsatisfying life who falls in love with a mysterious, dark-haired woman who no one seems to know or even see. In a city of violence, love is too much for the ones who only answer to the call of blood. One of my favourite stories in the collection.

The Cure for Too Much Feeling - Bernie McGill: A woman has been haunted by a mistake of the past to the point where even a painting is too disturbing for her.

The Speaking and the Dead - Tara West: A mother is desperately trying to contact her son, who committed suicide, through a series of charlatans who call themselves ‘psychics’. Not the best moment in the collection.

‘’I haunt myself’’
Settling - Jan Carson: A humorous, yet poignant story in which a couple frustrated with Belfast (for reasons no one knows…) moves to London. The woman feels imprisoned there in contrast to her husband who behaves as if he’s won the bloody lottery. The only thing that keeps her sane is her dead grandma. Literally.

Oh, the joys of marital routine, fighting over teapots and frying pans…God, no. Not for me, thank you!

‘’She stops, heart pounding. Sluts. Illegitimate children. Changelings, and fairies to blame them upon. Nothing feels neutral any more, she thinks. It never will again.’’

Mayday - Lucy Caldwell: A young woman is haunted by her unwanted pregnancy, the religious guilt and the memories of a complex childhood. Regardless of my personal view on the matter of abortion, this story deals with an extremely sensitive issue in elegant, almost poetic writing. You feel the sadness and the despair in your heart.

‘’He saw me as the Madonna; a black-haired seraph, crackleware skinned. Santa Maria! he’d yell, when he stumbled from bed in the small hours, sending the storm lantern swinging. For the waves that had swept him to Ireland had stayed inside his skull, leaving him forever listing; the world a tilting deck.’’

The Seventh Man - Roisin O’Donnell: When a dark-haired siren falls in love…
This is the finest story in the collection. A myth, steeped in sensuality and solemnity. A siren narrates her time among the mortals, her men and the love between her and her last husband. The entire Irish history passes before her eyes and I have a soft spot for stories with dark-haired sirens…
The shore is always a threshold: between land and sea, memory and forgetting, silence and voice. These stories hold that spirit — fragments of lives that endure loss, remember resilience, and claim the fragile beauty of belonging.
Reading this in early autumn feels right. The season itself mirrors the themes of the collection — light slipping away sooner, the air carrying a sharper edge, everything marked by both change and continuity. Each story, like each falling leaf, is complete in itself, but together they form a landscape, a chorus of voices that should not be forgotten.
‘’I am a fire someone has forgotten to light, an empty ship too heavy to float.’’
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less