The essay focuses on the intersection of Jamesian features and the representation of Irishness in his Brooklyn. Tóibín is an accomplished Jacobite both as an author (Tóibín 2004) and as a critic (Tóibín 2010), but he is also an internationally acclaimed Irish author with a serious interest in Irish issues. The task at hand is to look into the Jamesian legacy in Brooklyn, by our mutual favourite, Colm Tóibín. Email: This paper discusses some secrets concerning Colm Tóibín and Henry James-some open secrets. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (Mellen, 2006) and Literature in Context (Jate Press, 2010). Her current research into travel writing involves re-reading texts by Edith Wharton and Henry James as travel accounts. Key words: Irish feminine, “Mother Ireland,” re-visiting Ireland, nostalgia, Irish short stories. Her short stories approach the Irish identity from within, narrating the present from a close distance. Keegan delves into a sociological depiction of this new Ireland. Her fiction does not represent a commemoration of loss nor a return to nostalgia but, rather, a celebration of a twofold newness in Irish society as a whole and in the role of the Irish woman in particular. Among many other issues, Claire Keegan’s short fiction revisits O’Brien’s “Mother Ireland” and questions traditional and hegemonic approaches to this eternal Irish feminine within a new discourse of Ireland. In Antarctica (1999) and Walking the Blue Fields (2007), short story writer Claire Keegan’s compelling fictional skills do not only offer a re-visioning of those eternal ideals of Ireland’s past. This paper revisits that Mother Ireland of O’Brien’s fiction that has transformed herself into a (M)other Ireland best expressed through a new contemporary portrayal of her plights and predicaments. Back in 1976 Edna O’Brien published a series of essays entitled Mother Ireland in which her aim was to portray an eternal and contemporary Ireland that seemed to be anchored in a line of ancestry and remembrance, legend and truth.

Brooklyn de colm toibin