Although Milton’s relationship with Ireland will not be as active after 1653 as it had been in the previous fifteen years, Ireland does not entirely disappear from Milton’s work. Ireland is implied in “On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” and in Paradise Lost (1667, 1674). Ireland also appears occasionally in Milton’s The History of Britain. Milton’s personal connections to Ireland grow after the Cromwellian conquest. More importantly, though, Milton has been a persistent presence in Ireland – not only as a literary figure, but also as a republican political theorist: He is cited by Irish Republicans in the eighteenth and twentienth centuries, and by Irish authors including W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern, Eimear McBride, and more. At the same time, Milton’s insights into pre-Cromwellian Ireland represent a hidden potential for today’s post-Brexit Ireland.

This coda examines responses to Edna O’Brien’s fiction of the 1960s and 1970s and recent novels by Eimear McBride, in order to assess the changing climate for Irish women’s fiction and characterisations of the Irish woman writer. Both sets of works anatomise women’s experience at crucial junctures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but while O’Brien’s work was banned in the 1960s for its reputedly salacious content, in contrast, Eimear McBride’s sexually explicit 2013 novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (though it took years to find a publisher) was immediately embraced by critics and celebrated as an exemplar of contemporary Irish writing. The chapter discusses responses to the female bildungsroman and representations of female sexuality, sexual abuse, and violence.