Take Six: Six Irish Women Writers —Farrelly’s editorial vision is cohesive, intelligent, and subtle
by Ruby Eastwood
Take Six: Six Irish Women Writers (Dedalus Books) is a rich and quietly urgent anthology that explores the moral and emotional dissonance in the Irish female experience through a realist lens. Editor Tanya Farrelly introduces the collection with an acknowledgement of the invisibility many women writers endure, emphasising a desire to highlight overlooked voices. What follows is a thoughtfully curated set of stories that, while varying in tone, setting, and subject, share a preoccupation with ethical ambiguity, emotional fracture, and the muted drama of the everyday.
a rich and quietly urgent anthology that explores the moral and emotional dissonance in the Irish female experience
The opening story, Mary Morrissy’s Undocumented, is unexpectedly narrated by a man. Shay is in his forties and living illegally in New York, but returning to Dublin for his brother’s birthday. The story’s strength lies not in plot twists but in character exposure. Shay, though the narrative follows his point of view, is gradually unveiled as selfish and emotionally stunted. Initially he presents himself as a victim of circumstance, trapped in a relationship with a pregnant girlfriend he no longer wants and cornered by family expectations, but by the story’s end, his true nature becomes unmistakable.
After a drunken sexual encounter with his brother’s new partner that ends in physical injury, he makes a half-hearted confession that veers on cowardly deflection. “I made a pass at Colette,” he admits. “I mean, we collided…” That ellipsis becomes emblematic of a man evading consequence. The cleverness of Undocumented is its tonal balance: it’s darkly comic, but the implications are tragic. It is a story about a man misbehaving, but it is really a story about the women around him, whose interiority is hidden but who must bear the consequences of his actions.
The cleverness of Undocumented is its tonal balance
Themes of entrapment and emotional inertia recur throughout the collection. Morrissy’s Holding On is another standout, a masterfully compressed portrait of a woman trapped, literally and metaphorically, in a toilet stall during a holiday in Spain. The protagonist, Steph, is middle-aged, recently emptied of her mothering role, and contemplating leaving her husband. While locked in the stall, her mind spirals into memories of childhood shame and adult disappointment. The toilet becomes a site of both physical and existential containment: “She couldn’t ‘unsee’ it. Nor could she forget the fiery turbulence that lay beneath it.” When her husband finally arrives, her declaration—“I’m leaving you, Austin”—seems less like the start of a new chapter and more like a cry inside a sealed box. The eventual unlocking of the stall doesn’t deliver liberation. Instead, it reinforces the futility of her gesture. Her husband responds with quiet resignation, and she retreats, not into a new life, but into the same one, slightly more frayed.
Geraldine Mills pulls emotional precision into the realm of dystopia
If Morrissy’s work grounds itself in psychological realism, Geraldine Mills’s XX pulls that emotional precision into the realm of dystopia. The story imagines a future where giving birth to girls is criminalized, and chromosomes are manipulated to ensure only males are born. The protagonist discovers she is carrying a girl and lies to protect the unborn child. The speculative setting is sparsely drawn, but its implications are chilling. “You have broken the law,” the doctors tell her. But it is the maternal instinct to shield the vulnerable at all costs that lends the story its pathos. This piece aligns beautifully with the quieter emotional dramas of other stories, showcasing similar concerns in a different setting.
Another futurist tale, The Creators by Mary O’Donnell, extends the anthology’s speculative streak. Fiona, the protagonist, is conscripted to the Garden Isles, where women work underground to grow food for a society that seems to have turned the natural world into both prison and factory. “So—I’m to be one of those girls, those fuckin’ posing girls—planting and picking for the nation,” Fiona spits, voicing a bitter awareness of how female labour, especially reproductive or nurturing labour, is endlessly repurposed for collective gain.
O’Donnell resists world-building in favour of character interiority, trusting readers to extrapolate the horrors from suggestion
Like XX, this story is dystopian not in aesthetics but in concept. O’Donnell resists world-building in favour of character interiority, trusting readers to extrapolate the horrors from suggestion. Both Mills and O’Donnell depict women trapped by the very systems they were told would save them, a bitterly ironic inversion that is all too recognisable in real life politics.
This motif of being summoned under false pretences reappears in Rosemary Jenkinson’s The Peacemaker, another story told from the male perspective. Shane, a former IRA bomb-maker turned peace advocate, travels to Kyiv to speak on reconciliation, only to find he’s been lured under suspicion of returning to violence. “But I came here to talk peace,” he protests. “I haven’t built a bomb in over thirty years.”
The story, taut and satirical, explores the burden of personal history and the inability to ever fully disown one’s past. While Shane is a more sympathetic figure than Shay from Undocumented, he is similarly caught in a moral tangle, where intentions are outpaced by memory and instinct.
Across these stories, the through-line is clear: there is no interest in neat resolutions or lyrical escape. Instead, the stories linger in aftermaths, stalemates, and the liminal spaces between confession and concealment. Even the anthology’s more speculative entries eschew grand world-building in favour of quiet, human dilemmas.
Farrelly’s editorial vision is cohesive, intelligent, and subtle
Farrelly’s editorial vision is cohesive, intelligent, and subtle. Rather than assembling a showcase of virtuosity for its own sake, she brings together writers whose stories reflect one another in tone and temperament. The stories are not showy; they unfold. Each narrative, in its own way, attends to the small decisions that shape or deform a life. Whether it is Shay’s careless betrayal, Steph’s muffled rage, or Fiona’s grim resignation, each protagonist is offered a moment to act. Most hesitate. Many retreat. The result is an anthology where revelation often arrives too late—or just in time to make us flinch. In centering women’s voices, both as characters and creators, Take Six reminds us that the emotional and moral weight of a culture often rests in stories too often overlooked.
