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Because of their evocations of a seemingly timeless rural Ireland with all its familiar clichés, Claire Keegan's stories have often been compared to those of John McGahern. Through an analysis of a number of Keegan's stories, all offering a daughter's perspective on this rural Ireland, this essay shows that, unlike John McGahern, Keegan is actually interested in recording and staging change. This essay first considers these stories in the context of earlier dramatizations of the mother-daughter plot in fiction by Irish women writers such as Edna O'Brien, Mary Lavin and Mary Beckett, arguing that the development of Keegan's daughters follows a far more positive trajectory and that their relationship with the mother is typically characterized in terms of “similarity with a difference”. Second, this essay analyses Keegan's use of the first-person present tense in most of these daughter stories to show that this peculiar narrative mode further underscores the dimension of change. Finally, the essay offers a reading of Foster, which brings all of these strands together in a powerful “long short story”.

“And the Transformation Begins”: Present-Tense Narration in Claire Keegan’s Daughter Stories