Anyone who’s read, or seen the latest adaptation of, Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life will remember the hapless Irish maid, Bridget, accused in an early scene of being ‘brought up in a field’. As Catherine Healy explores in her Prize Winning essay in this issue, Ethnic Jokes: Mocking the Working Irish Woman, ‘Bridget’ is a stock comic figure of the nineteenth-century press, appearing liberally in English, Irish and American light journalism. Healy’s essay extends and deepens the explorations pioneered in
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