‘Gentility Keeps Breaking Through’: Women and the Middle-Class Northern Protestant House in Janet McNeill’s The Maiden Dinosaur

Abstract

Janet McNeill’s fiction has experienced a recent revival, led by London-based publisher Turnpike Books, which reissued three of her novels between 2014 and 2015, with a fourth due in autumn 2019. The Maiden Dinosaur (1964/2015) is her best-known book, and it depicts Northern Ireland at a transitional moment in its history, during the post-war period and preceding the recommencement of the Troubles. McNeill explores vestigial systems of power that endure in Northern Ireland amidst the shifting gender, class, religious, and political contexts of the early 1960s. This essay analyses her rendering of the middle-class Northern Protestant house, and argues that it is a metonym for patriarchal structures that pervade mid-century Belfast society. McNeill examines how the women of her generation manoeuvre within this circumscribed space, and her novel represents an aesthetic gesture of self-liberation.