Set in the 1980s, Keegan’s novel adds to the collective narrative about the Magdalen laundries, but with a somewhat different perspective. He emphasizes that the extant history of 20th-century laundries, such as it is, has been told mostly through subjective stories within documentary, memoir, film, fiction, poetry and visual art. Smith notes that a full history of the laundries cannot be written until the religious orders that owned them open their archives to scholars and the public, which few have done. In Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, author James M. The last of the Magdalen laundries in Ireland closed in 1996.
Often the nuns who supervised the laundries took babies from the inmates to be raised in orphanages or put up for adoption. They worked without pay, profiting the convents and religious orders that ran commercial laundry operations.
Their hair was cropped, they were required to wear formless clothing, some were given new names, and contact with their families and verbal reminiscing were discouraged or prevented. Some were confined for years, or even lifetimes, with government collusion. Most of the inmates - unwed mothers, including victims of rape and incest, as well as other “fallen” or “feeble minded” females - were placed there by their families. In 20th-century Ireland, Magdalen laundries were in effect religious penitentiaries. Keegan has written a novel in large part about us. After he encounters an abused woman there, he must decide whether to help her at the expense of his family’s well-being.įew readers of Small Things Like These can be certain they would reach the same decision Furlong does. The plot follows Bill Furlong, a New Ross family man and merchant who is troubled as he becomes aware of what occurs in the local Magdalen laundry. Yet the subject of the novel is often painful. Keegan’s short novel, which could just as well be called a long short story, is stylistically lovely and imbued with her passion for seeing. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before disappearing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. When she was a teenager, Joan Didion studied the opening to Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, a paragraph of “four deceptively simple sentences, 126 words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them.” A young writer today could study with similar pleasure the opening paragraph of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, a novel set in a 20th century town that includes a Magdalen laundry, one of Ireland’s imprisoning institutions for unwed mothers:
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