“I never could forget my darling mother” : The language of recollection in a corpus of female Irish emigrant correspondence
- Submitting institution
-
Coventry University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 19208629
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.1080/1081602X.2016.1155469
- Title of journal
- History of the Family
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 315
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 3
- ISSN
- 1081-602X
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- March
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research uses a mixed methods approach to analyse female Irish emigrant correspondence – the Lough family letters – which roughly span the 1880s to 1920s. It combines traditional historical sciences methods with digital humanities, to offer new insights into the study of the female emigrant letter. The research is located at the nexus of migration history, gender and emotions, and seeks to make a further contribution to the field of cultural memory and the gendered experience of migration.
The post-famine period from the 1850s to the 1920s was a time that saw a significant increase in female migration from Ireland to North America. Economic changes in Ireland, including declining wage-earning capabilities due to the de-industrialisation of the Irish countryside, as well as changes in inheritance practices from partible to impartible inheritance systems, led to changes in marriage trends. In short, women married ‘less frequently and at later ages than in the pre-famine past’, thus contributing to ‘a massive post-famine emigration by young, unmarried women’(Miller et. al., 1995, p. 3). A small glimpse into the lives of these young women – their preoccupations, experiences, perceptions and beliefs – can be found in the letters they wrote home to their families in Ireland. The research concludes that memory plays an important factor in connection between writer and reader separated by ocean, and this is evidenced in language (‘remember’, ‘used (to)’) whose frequency was not previously visible to analysis. In addition, analysis of projection structures such as ‘suppose’ (‘I suppose you still…’) are used to construct an unchanging imagined homeland, in contrast to an America that represents change, difference and progress.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
