The middle decades of twentieth-century Irish cultural history have often been described in terms of strict social codes, religious obscurantism, sexual repression and excessive censorship that banned any representation of sexuality that threatened the stringent sexual mores in Ireland’s theocratic society. Vehement opposition to both censorship and sexual puritanism came from The Bell, Ireland’s most influential mid-century literary magazine, edited by Seán O’Faoláin and Peadar O’Donnell. Throughout its lifespan, The Bell campaigned for writing that confronted controversial subjects, and was able to regularly publish short stories that engaged with taboo topics such as same-sex desire, illegitimacy, abortion and extra-marital sex. This essay explores the various ways in which writers responded to The Bell’s calls for frank treatments of sexual matters in their short fiction, and suggests that the poetics of the modern short story – which allowed writers to camouflage their subversive content – combined with ineffective legislation for the banning of periodicals meant that short stories in Irish literary magazines were effectively the censors’ blind spot, and thus contributed to the freeing up of cultural attitudes around sexuality that gradually took place in the second half of the twentieth century.   Keywords: The Bell; Irish Short Stories; Sexuality; Irish Periodicals; Censorship; Seán O’Faoláin; Peadar O’Donnell.

This essay examines the role played by magazine culture in the exclusion of women writers from the traditional Irish short story canon by looking at the presence and representation of women writers in The Bell (1940–1954), Ireland’s most influential mid-twentieth century literary periodical. The magazine did much to promote aspiring short story writers, but was less willing to perform their role as cultivator of new talent typical of periodical publication when it came to women apprentices. The first part of the essay gives a general picture of women’s presence in the magazine. The second part probes the underlying assumptions with have led to the systematic curtailment of women writers, and the final section maps the wider impact of these processes on the short story canon in Ireland. Despite The Bell’s progressive and inclusive credentials, the magazine proved to be an uncongenial place for women writers: with its masculine rhetoric, its representation of authorship as a male preserve, its persistent othering of women writers, its foregrounding of male experience in its fiction, and the effects of male gatekeeping, The Bell uncritically reflected and reproduced the rigid binary divisions that separated male and female spheres in Irish society at large, and ultimately contributed to the marginalization of women writers in the short story canon in Ireland.

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