In her inaugural address as President of Ireland in 1990, Mary Robinson stated that she saw her election as an opportunity for Irish people worldwide to ‘tell diverse stories […] stories of celebration through the arts and stories of conscience and social justice’. Seven years later Gerry Smyth argued that

Arguably, there had not been a generation of Irish writers so conscious of the contribution they were making to the redefinition of Irish identities since the Literary Revival a century before. Part of this development was the rapidly increasing number of short stories by female Irish writers which began to appear during the 1980s. This was largely the result of the social and cultural changes that had taken place in Ireland over the previous two decades, as the country slowly moved away from the old certainties of Catholicism, nationalism and patriarchy. The changing role of women in Irish society was a pronounced feature of this transformation and the women's movement a key catalyst in the process. In the literary world, this was evidenced by the emergence of small feminist presses such as Attic Press and Arlen House. Despite these changes, women's rights in Ireland experienced setbacks such as the results of the abortion and divorce referenda in 1983 and 1986. As a result, large numbers of women continued to leave the country, the majority choosing to migrate to London and the south-east of England. The more positive changes for women that had taken place in Ireland, however, were reflected in the London Irish community, with a marked expansion and diversification of women's involvement in cultural and political activities. A series of London Irish women's conferences in the mid-1980s were crucial in this regard and led to, for instance, the establishment of Fine Lines, an Irish women writers’ group.

The two writers I focus on in this chapter, Emma Donoghue and Sara Berkeley, both lived in the south-east of England at this time. Donoghue is now one of Ireland's best-known female writers.