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Agnes Owens: The Complete Short Stories

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A Working Mother' is a wildly entertaining cautionary tale: while Betty’s husband Adam broods and drinks (to be matched at times by Betty, just to be sociable) she flirts with their best friend Brendan and tries to avoid the roving hands of her new employer.

Jones, Carol, “Burying the Man that was: Janice Galloway and Gender Disorientation”, in Berthold Schoene (ed. This complete collection of Agnes Owens’ five novellas opens with 'Like Birds in the Wilderness', a portrait of brickie Mac. Yet this also meant that being a woman proved even more of a difficulty since these novels were quintessentially male. The family was poor, but not uncommonly so and, despite Owens being described as a “hopeless case” at school, they insisted she go to college to learn typing. In spite of Owens’s admiration for and friendship with Gray and Kelman, it is worth noting that she was just as equally adamant that her work was very different from theirs.Sam’s drinking often saw him hospitalised, she said: “That was my happiest time, going to visit him. Short-stories are considered more difficult to market – which explains why Gentlemen of the West was first published as a novel – and in the case of Owens, writing only short stories and novellas seems to have contributed to the erroneous impression that she is not a fully-fledged author. After considering her position towards a gender-oriented conception of literature, this paper will explore how the victimization of women in her fiction functions as a paradigm of vulnerability and how her relentless depiction of disempowerment becomes both an aesthetic and an ethical choice. This period of positivity came to an abrupt end with the murder of her youngest son, 19-year-old Patrick, in 1987.

As for her taste for “a male character” it seems to have been motivated mainly by her distaste for some recent publications for, in a different context, she had said: “I get vaguely tired of the Scottish situation and the Glasgow man” ( ibid . See for instance Pirie-Hunter’s use of Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980 to underline society’s indulgence towards the vagaries of men (Pirie-Hunter 72-73).

The trivial phrase “as if this jolt had done the trick” and the casual way in which her husband’s violence is revealed – and presented as something she has come to perceive as normative behaviour – are disturbingly anticlimactic. As the novel proceeds the humour is darker, and there is less of it, but very much to the benefit of the story, fewer laughs but much more poignant.

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