The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me: Poet & Context

“The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me” Poet & Context

Eavan Boland (1944 – 2020) was an influential Irish poet, who drew attention to the overlooked female perspectives in Irish literature.
Raised in Dublin, she spent her childhood in London and New York, which exposed her to various cultures and literatures.
Boland’s inclusive perspective, as seen in her poems, rejected the alienation of women and the poor from Irish mythology and history.

“The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave Me” depicts a romantic affair set in Paris. The affairs are likened to the heatwave in 1892 and weather patterns, emphasising the precarious nature of love and power.
Through her poems, Boland demonstrates how ordinary things, like a fan, can become symbols of personal and historical memory.
This poem is not just about the heatwave of 1892, but contextualizes the heatwave historically and personally, within the familiar and the familial.

Boland uses her experience as a woman, wife, and mother to bring a female perspective to the largely male dominated field of Irish poetic tradition.
She highlights how such ordinary items as a black lace fan can have profound meaning in personal experience, thus rewriting them into the historic and poetic narrative.

The black lace fan symbolises the woman’s power, beauty, and delicacy.
Heat and weather are symbols depicting the intensity of love affair and the passion involved.
The fan is a metaphor for the woman herself, indicating her true power and potential hidden behind her beauty and delicacy.