poor, uneducated, Catholic female in Northern Ireland in the 1960s; she had few choices and they were the traditional ones: marriage or work a dead-end job. For young Molloy, marriage was out the question because she did not want to replicate her own mother’s life. Molloy believed that God did have a higher plan for her life, and she believed that she would better serve the world as a nun than as a seamstress in a pajama factory. Frances Molloy gives a voice to the poverty, prejudice, and violence the Catholic community endured in Northern Ireland under the Stormont Government in the post-World War II era. While identity is always at the forefront of society in Northern Ireland, there is little record of the Catholic female, bound by tradition and poverty, in the North. A group without a history is a group without an identity—no one has yet written a history of the poor Northern Irish Catholic female in the latter half of the twentieth century. Frances Molloy was a Catholic woman in a sectarian state, and her story includes discrimination, segregation, and unjust incarceration in Northern Ireland in the latter half of the twentieth century. Jennifer M. Jeffers is Professor of English at Cleveland State University, USA, where she specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish and British Literature, Film, and Gender Studies. She is the author of Beckett’s Masculinities (2009), Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature (2006), and The Irish Novel at the End of the Twentieth Century: Gender, Bodies and Power (2002). She is the editor for the Palgrave series New Interpretations of Samuel Beckett in the Twenty-First Century and custodian of the Frances Molloy archive. |