Foster

Claire Keegan is an acclaimed Irish writer, most well-known for her short stories and novellas. She grew up as the eldest of three boys and three girls on a farm on the border of Wicklow and Wexford. At 17, she moved to the U.S. to study literature at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana. She subsequently earned an M.A. in literature from the University of Wales before receiving an M.Phil at Trinity College in Dublin. Keegan published her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, in 1999. That book went on to win the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published in 2007. Keegan initially published the short story “Foster” in The New Yorker before publishing a longer version of that story as a standalone book in 2010. Foster is now one of the readings for the Irish Leaving Certificate, which is the final exam for secondary schools in Ireland. Since publishing Foster, Keegan has published two more story collections as well as a novella, Small Things Like These, which was published in 2021.

Foster takes place in 1981 amid the 1981 Hunger Strike during the Troubles. The Troubles refer to the asymmetric war in Northern Ireland in which Irish nationalists and republicans protested the rule of the United Kingdom. The 1981 Hunger Strike came at the end of a five-year protest of Irish republican prisoners against the government of the United Kingdom. Those protests began in 1976 when the British government reclassified Irish republican soldiers so that they would no longer be considered political prisoners and would be considered criminals instead. Over the next five years, the Irish prisoners staged various protests, including the dirty protest, in which prisoners refused to wash their clothes or bathe. A hunger strike followed in 1980, which ended in 53 days. A second hunger strike began in 1981. That hunger strike ended after 10 of the Irish prisoners starved to death. In Foster, John mentions hearing on the news that one of the people involved in the hunger strike has died. The book also states that the girl’s mother, Mary, is pregnant despite not wanting to have more children. That perhaps alludes to the prohibition against contraception in Ireland, which lasted until 1980.

Keegan has cited Anton Chekhov as an influence on her work. Chekhov was a Russian playwright and writer who is often considered one of the greatest short story writers of all time. Many of his short stories can be found in the book Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, published in 2000. Keegan has also named Flannery O’Connor as an influence. Some of O’Connor’s most well-known works include the novel Wise Blood and the short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Another influence of Keegan’s is the writer John McGahern, whose most prominent novel, Amongst Women, is about an aging former IRA soldier who fought during the Irish Civil War in the 1920s. Keegan is primarily a short story writer, and her work has been compared to that of William Trevor, an Irish writer who was also considered a master of the short story. Trevor wrote several novels as well, which, like Foster, depict life in rural Ireland. Some of Trevor’s most well-known novels include The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer. Foster takes place during the Troubles in Ireland. One well-known nonfiction account of the Troubles is Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe.