Searching for ‘Maeve’: An Archival Examination of Medbh McGuckian’s Early Career as a Poet in Northern Ireland

Writing to Peter Fallon of the independent Irish publishing house Gallery Press in 1985, the poet Medbh McGuckian uncharacteristically signed the note ‘Maeve’, the Anglicized spelling of her name, with the explanation that, ‘I use that name as the letter was written by me and the poems by the other. So rejecting me does not entail accepting either of us’. This enigmatic note suggests that McGuckian perceives the personae in her poems as separate from the woman who writes them. To comprehend her poems, which are at once intricate, dynamic, and oblique, we must attempt to understand the other ‘Maeve’ whose prolific literary career has been shaped by challenges and opportunities posed by British, Irish and American publishing institutions. Using correspondence between the poet and her publishers archived at Emory University and Oxford University Press, this article explores Medbh McGuckian’s controversial transition from the Oxford Poets’ list to Gallery Press in 1991. It draws attention to the paratextual history of a little-known epigraph that quotes a letter which Roger Casement wrote to his sister from Banna Strand not long before his untimely death in 1916. By tracing the movement of the epigraph through McGuckian’s correspondence with publishing institutions, this essay examines the political perspectives at stake in Irish literary publication and considers the challenges contemporary Irish women poets face as they negotiate their personal and professional interests with those of publishing institutions.