47 pages • 1 hour read
Claire KeeganFoster
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Claire Keegan
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses abuse and infant separation.
Irish writer Claire Keegan was born in 1968 on a farm in County Wicklow, a midland region on the east coast of Ireland where she still lives and where Foster takes place. She is the youngest of her siblings and grew up Roman Catholic like the people in Foster. At age 17, she went to study political science and literature at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana, making her the first person to attend college from her family. She went on to get a Master of Arts at the University of Wales and a Master of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Her first publication, a collection of short stories entitled Antarctica released in 1999, received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Keegan is renowned for her insight into human behavior, writing often of the same emotions that shape Foster: disconnection, yearning, and surprising compassion. Though recognized much earlier in her native Ireland, Keegan sprang to more widespread prominence when her short novel Small Things Like These (2021) was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Like Foster, the book is set in the 1980s in rural Ireland and explores themes of compassion, neglect, and family. All of Keegan’s work is noted for its impactful brevity; according to The Guardian, her first five books comprise only 700 pages (Cummins, Anthony. “Claire Keegan: ‘I Can’t Explain My Work. I Just Write Stories.’” The Guardian, 2 Sept. 2023).
Historical Context: The Troubles and the 1980s Hunger Strikes
The 1980s in Ireland were part of the Troubles, also known as the Northern Ireland conflict, which took place from the 1960s until 1998. This violent clash was between Unionists, loyalists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain a member of the United Kingdom, and Nationalists, who believed that Northern Ireland should join the Republic of Ireland, which had achieved independence from Britain through the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922. The fighting was bloody, with over half of the casualties being civilians, and involved the deployment of the British Army against paramilitary groups such as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Though the Troubles were not explicitly a religious conflict, Northern Ireland was mostly Protestant, while the Republic of Ireland was generally Catholic, and Catholics in Northern Ireland felt discriminated against by the government there.
Foster is set in a southeastern area of Ireland, quite far from the most heated conflict, and everyone in the novella seems to be Catholic. However, the characters acknowledge the context of the Troubles when Keegan mentions the 1980s hunger strikes. These two hunger strikes by imprisoned Irish republicans were the final action of a protest that began in 1976 in response to the British government’s withdrawal of prisoner-of-war status from paramilitaries, rendering them legally criminals. In 1981, during the second strike, 10 prisoners starved to death, including a man who had been elected to parliament during the hunger strike. As is apparent in Foster, there was tremendous media interest in these events and the harsh conditions of the Northern Irish prison. The coverage of the dead men and their families radically increased sympathy for Nationalists.
Through including a reference to the 1981 hunger strike deaths, Keegan subtly underscores the importance of parenthood and the presence of grief in the text, as the strike began to break due to insistence by a prisoner’s mother that her son’s life be saved through medical intervention. Other families followed suit, and the hunger strike was ultimately called off more than six months after the first death.
Social Context: Roman Catholicism in 1980s Ireland
The socio-religious world of Foster is Catholic, as implied by the novella’s first line referencing Sunday Mass. Though other denominations use the term “Mass,” Catholics employ it the most frequently, while Protestants do so rarely. Furthermore, the text is explicitly set in a rural county in the majority Catholic Republic of Ireland. Catholicism shapes the story of Foster, most expressly in its prohibition of birth control resulting in the narrator’s farmer parents having more children than they can afford.
The weaponization of Catholic morality was the cause of much violence against women in Ireland in the 1980s, which was also suffering from a deep recession and high unemployment. Unwed pregnant women were sent away from home under a shroud of shame to have their babies in institutionalized facilities. Many infants were forcibly taken away while their mothers were sent to work in the abusive Magdalene laundries under orders from the Catholic Church—a subject Keegan tackles in Small Things Like These. Though none of this is explicitly mentioned in Foster, Ireland’s criminalization of abortion and limitation of women’s rights are implied in the narrator’s biological family dynamic. These circumstances also weight John Kinsella’s encouragement of the girl learning to run so fast that no man can catch her and inform Edna Kinsella’s refusal of shameful secrets.
Catholic structures also bring together community in the rural landscape of Foster. It is through weekly Mass that families living on spread-out farm plots see each other regularly, allowing Mildred to see that the Kinsellas have been dressing the narrator in their dead son’s clothes. Another example of communal gathering is the wake, which is a traditionally Irish Catholic ceremony to celebrate a dead person’s life. Family and friends keep the dead company through the night to ward off evil, and the lively event balances the solemnity of a Roman Catholic funeral service in which no eulogies are permitted.
