There has been a big trend in recent years for myths and legends to be retold from a female perspective, most famously Jenifer Saint’s series and Madeline Miller’s Circe. With Banshee, Ailbhe Malone brings together some excellent female writers and charges them with taking the ancient myths of Celtic Ireland and placing them in a context that shows the original female characters in a different perspective.
You get the feeling some of the authors featured in Banshee have been waiting for just such an opportunity as this. There is anger and bile, energy and urgency in the retellings.
Some of the original stories, such as the Children Of Lir, are modernised and manipulated into a new form that takes the source material merely as inspiration. Others, like The Merrow, keep the magical nature of the tale but place the action in a more recent Ireland. The best, Jess Kidd’s Boan and Salma El-Wardany’s Dirty Laundry, use the legends to reveal the nature of women who are at the heart of the stories. The abused Boan and cursed Deidre are not given appeasing endings; instead, their strengthened characters find fitting finales which match the emotion of their deeply tragic triumphs.
