ABSTRACT
The evolution of popular Irish women’s fiction over the past thirty years permits us to explore the journey of Irish women through the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger and the years of austerity that followed. This chapter will consider the works of two of Ireland’s foremost writers of popular fiction, Patricia Scanlan and Marian Keyes, in particular, Scanlan’s City Girl series of the early 1990s and Keyes’ Walsh family series of the mid-1990s through to the end of the noughties. Focusing on Scanlan’s City Girl and Keyes’ The Mystery of Mercy Close, it will consider how their narratives of material consumption, and later of resourcefulness, comment on the new place of consumerism in Irish society and the conflicting force of traditional values. Additionally, as the authors have grown older, their characters have grown with them, and a lens on Scanlan’s and Keyes’ fiction allows for considering the way the experience and representation of ageing for women, informed by the demands of a youth-oriented consumer-driven society, exacerbates social expectations. To varying degrees, their works draw attention to the gendered effects of economic policies and social change and demonstrate the pressures and contradictions of a neoliberal value system.
