Hardly working: eliding remunerative labour in recent Irish women’s fiction

ABSTRACT This article examines Sara Baume’s Seven Steeples (2020), Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, and Caoilinn Hughes’ Orchid and the Wasp (2018) and The Wild Laughter (2020) as reactions against the capitalist expectation that human worth can be measured by an individual’s contribution towards remunerative labour. These texts are all recent novels by young Irish women writers in which the protagonists seek a form of work which elides participation in the neoliberal economic system – either as profit-making or salaried workers, or in the traditionally female role of providing domestic labour to a profit-making or salaried male partner. The article explores the fraught relationship between these novels’ protagonists and a globalised labour market which is simultaneously scarred by, and in continued denial about, the existential shock it faced in the 2008–9 financial crash, with a particular focus on the Republic of Ireland’s role as a key site of late capitalist deregulation, where the effects of the crash were particularly severely felt.