On 17 March, Irish female writer Eimear McBride visited Beijing Foreign Studies University and gave a lecture on her best sellerA Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing at the Irish Studies Center. The writer and the Irish Studies teachers as well as the students shared with each other their understandings of this book and some other topics. Ambassadress Rosemary Kavanagh of Irish Embassy in Beijing, Professor Chen Li and Professor Hou Yiling of School of English and International Studies attended the lecture.
Eimear McBride began with reading in person some extracted paragraphs in her book. Her emotional Irish language took all the audience into her story, making it easier for them to understand and feel the narrator’s inner feelings and the novel’s plot. In the novelA Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride used traditional and interrupted Irish English to depict a story of how an errant Irish girl grew out of a shattered and violent family of a departed father, an abusive mother, a predatory uncle and a dying brother, and struggled to survive in a modern Ireland.
Following the reading, McBride talked about the background of the creation of her novel—the influence of Joyce’s “stream of consciousness”. She said that in her mid-20s, she first encountered “Ulysses”, which was decisive to her creation. She admitted, “Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else”. She then wrote the novel fast, in six months, at the age of 27, and spent the next nine years trying to get it published. McBride also said that apart from the obvious Joycean influence, there was also the example of the American writer William Faulkner and the great playwright Samuel Beckett in her work.
Near the end of the lecture, students at Irish Studies Center raised different questions to McBride relating to the background and some certain contents of the novel. Furthermore, the teachers and students talked with McBride about their own understandings of the novel respectively and communicated with her on topics such as feminism and Irish women’s social status. All of the participants were quite content with the informative and inspiring lecture.
