SOURCE: Stevenson, Anne. “Inside and Outside History.” P.N. Review 18, no. 3 (January-February 1992): 34-5.

In the following essay, Stevenson regards Boland's encounter with the Achill woman, chronicled in her verse and her essay “Outside History,” as an important moment in her life and work.

As will be evident to anyone who has followed Eavan Boland's purgatorial journey into self-placement, the story of her meeting with the Achill woman occurs at least twice in her published work: once in the verse sequence of Outside History (Carcanet, 1990), and again as a prologue to her essay of the same title (P.N.R. 75). Boland, then a student at Trinity College, had borrowed a friend's cottage on Achill Island for a week at Easter, bringing with her, for study, a volume of the Court poets of the Silver Age, ‘those 16th century song-writers like Wyatt and Raleigh, whose lines appear so elegant … yet...