Kennedy, Sighle

Sighle Aileen Kennedy was born on 27 July 1919 in the United States to parents who had emigrated from Ireland in the first decade of the twentieth century. She received her undergraduate degree from Manhattanville College. After spending eight years as a reporter for an architectural and engineering journal, and twelve years working for Catholic Relief Services in countries including South Korea, Kennedy began graduate studies in English literature at Columbia University in 1963.

At Columbia, Kennedy was advised by Professor William York Tindall, whom she later honored with an essay in the festschrift Modern Irish Literature (1972). The notebook she kept while reading for her comprehensive exams (Box 2, Folder 1)--part study aid, part diary--shows Kennedy to have been a sensitive, insightful and enthusiastic reader of modern English-language literature, one who was drawn very early in her scholarly career to the writings of Samuel Beckett. Her first comments on Watt, the 1953 Beckett novel that would become her scholarly preoccupation for the next thirty years, reveal Kennedy to have been both horrified by ("His visions are explicitly disgusting. Dear old Ireland--what have we done to ourselves?") and deeply interested in the book. Several entries in the notebook establish that Kennedy was a devout Catholic, one who took her religion seriously enough to question both her faith and behavior and the church as an institution. The diary also reveals the extent to which sexism pervaded academe in the era; one November 1963 entry briefly recounts a visit with a Columbia professor who, Kennedy reports, advised her that "teaching in a college ... is something at which a woman is at a disadvantage." Nevertheless, Kennedy pressed on, passed her exams, and moved on to the dissertation stage.

...