More than valuable historical accounts, both books are a vital reckoning with the present.
Over decades, thousands of Irish women and girls were sent to Magdalene Laundries. Each was perceived to have fallen in some way. The Fallen: The Magdalene Laundries and Ireland’s Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan is a haunting and immersive book exploring the dark history of Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries. Drawing on survivors’ testimonies, Louise Brangan recovers the lives of six women: Eileen, Carmel, Nora, Catherine, Brigid and Katie. Unflinching and compassionate, she dismantles long-held myths about what the Laundries were, who was sent there, and why.
Lara Feigel’s Custody: The Secret History of Mothers is the story of seven women - Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears - who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who lost the care they most needed. These fascinating, charismatic, complex women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too - writers, lovers, or activists - and they and their children were punished for these attempts. Custody offers an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care.
Dr Louise Brangan researches injustice and punishment. She is a 2023 BBC and AHRC New Generation Thinker and winner of the 2024 Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award. Lara Feigel is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly for the Guardian and contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. She appeared as a lead contributor in the landmark BBC 1 cultural history of the interwar years, Art that Made Us .
In conversation with writer and journalist Roe McDermott .