Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her short fiction. She was born in 1968 and grew up in a large family in County Wicklow, Ireland. Keegan attended college at Loyola University in New Orleans, studying English and political sciences. She received her master’s in creative writing from the University of Wales and later earned an M.Phil at Trinity College Dublin. She published her debut collection of short stories, Antarctica, in 1999. It received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, as well as the inaugural William Trevor Prize. Her short story “Foster” was published in the New Yorker in 2010. The story was adapted for film as An Cailín Ciúin (A Quiet Girl) in 2022. Keegan’s novella Small Things like These was published in 2021. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction in 2022 and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Its film adaptation of the same name premiered at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. Keegan’s short fiction has won numerous awards, including the Olive Cook Award, the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, and the Francis MacManus Award. Keegan has taught at numerous universities and been awarded numerous fellowships. Her most recent short story collection, So Late in the Day, was shortlisted for the Irish “Novel of the Year” award. 

Although Small Things Like These is a work of fiction, the Magdalene laundry at the center of its plot is based on institutions that exited in history. Magdalene Laundries in Ireland (also called Magdalene asylums) date back to the 18th century. Although they were most often operated by Roman Catholic orders, the first laundry—the Dublin Magdalen Asylum—was run by the (Protestant) Church of Ireland and accepted only Protestant women. Ireland’s Catholic laundries persisted into the late 20th century—the last one closed in 1996. Funded by the state and run by religious orders, laundries were established ostensibly to “save” the souls of so-called “fallen women,” which primarily referred to sex workers in the 18th century. Later, other types of women were housed at laundries, including unwed mothers. The initial goal of laundries was to house sex workers and thereby curtail sex work and give sex workers a means to redeem their souls through hard—not to mention often unpaid and unrecognized—labor. In fact, the institutions did little to curb sex work, for they failed to address the rampant poverty and lack of a social safety net that created a demand for sex work and a supply of sex workers in the first place. Despite its failure to meet its intended goal, the laundries persisted and even became more in demand due to the opportunity for free labor they offered. As such, laundries were key players in the broader, patriarchal oppression of women and girls in Ireland. As laundries grew in number, the treatment of women and girls housed there worsened, with frequent violence and abuse. The exact number of women and girls kept there is today not known—hardly any records exist for the women who were housed at laundries in the 19th and 20th centuries—but estimates are around 30,000. In Dublin in 1993, 133 unmarked graves were discovered on the property of Sisters of Our Lady of Charity, which operated a laundry. The discovery led to a public scandal, bringing to light the troubling history surrounding Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, which had previously been shrouded in secrecy. Despite this, it was not until 2013 that the Irish government issued an apology to victims of the Magdalene laundries.

Although Small Things like These is a novel, Keegan is best known for her works of short fiction. Her short story collections include Antarctica (1999), Walk the Blue Fields (2007), The Forester’s Daughter (2019), and So Late in the Day (2023). Her short story Foster was published in the New Yorker in 2010. Another notable Irish writer of short fiction is William Trevor, who is known for his novels as well. Similar to Keegan, Trevor’s works often focus on marginalized people. His works often focused on tensions between Protestant and Catholic populations, a theme that Keegan alludes to in Small Things like These with the character of wealthy widow Mrs. Wilson. Finally, Keegan’s novel looks critically at the subjugation of women in a culture heavily influenced by restrictive religious norms, Catholicism in the case of Keegan’s fictional town of New Ross. Other Irish writers to write on these issues include Edna O’Brien, whose debut novel The Country Girls (1960s) scandalously spoke frankly about matters of sexuality from a female perspective. Milkman by Northern Irish writer Anna Burns is set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and deals with similar issues of female oppression, but with greater emphasis on the sociopolitical circumstances of the time.