We present an extract from Marian Keyes and the Politics of Commercial Fiction, the new book by Dr. Maria Butler.
Marian Keyes is one of Ireland's most important fiction authors but is often not celebrated as such. Keyes’ novels draw on the author’s trademark charm, wit, and pathos, yet her girly packaging and light-hearted marketing resulted in far too little critical attention and celebration compared to her literary contemporaries.
This groundbreaking study seeks to challenge the existing narrative on Keyes and open a window to her extraordinary writings for future readers.
How is commercial fiction political?
Commercial fiction offers authors an opportunity to communicate with readers about emerging socio-political issues. As such, 'Popular narratives play a vital role in mediating social change, informing their audience of new currents and allowing the reader to insert him – or herself into new scenarios in a way that can be related to her or his own experience'. This mediation can be political if the text attempts, or appears to attempt, to assert influence over its readers’ worldview. Author George Orwell cites political purpose, described as ‘[d]esire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after’, as one of the four main motivators to write. Recent scholarship draws attention to this impulse amongst authors of contemporary genre fiction. To date, author-specific studies in the commercial women’s fiction and popular romance genres remain conspicuously absent from this scholarship. Nevertheless, Marian Keyes’ work, the Aisling series, the collected works of Patricia Scanlan and Cathy Kelly, and many other examples from romance-adjacent commercial fiction can be categorised as political, and indeed activist, works because their fiction advocates for social justice, i.e. ‘the treatment of inequalities of all kinds’. Acclaimed Irish journalist and pro-choice activist Una Mullally proclaims, ‘Artists are, and will continue to be, central to revolution, to activism, to protest, and more broadly to telling us stories about ourselves.’ This style of commercial fiction often embodies and amplifies the perspectives proffered by both formal and grassroots activist networks: for example, addiction and depression are considered illnesses, and abortion should be legally available. Similarly, grassroots activism is often rooted in an individual’s connection to a particular idea or vision. Thus, literary activism could precipitate collective action by introducing readers to ‘an idea that is not accepted or is regarded as illegitimate by the wider society’.
Like commercial women's fiction, protest novels have historically been denigrated as inferior literature.
As per many forms of activism, the definition of literary activism is nebulous. I define it as the use of literature, in this case fiction, to attempt to draw readers’ attention to the contexts, outcomes, and potential solutions of social and political injustices with the hope that it might move marginalised members of society towards equal footing. The version of social activism that I identify in contemporary commercial women’s fiction is distinct from the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American protest novel but there is overlap between the two forms. They both draw readers attention to social injustice and inequality, and they have both been dismissed as inferior literature. The American protest novel tries to impart knowledge and empathy directly to readers to encourage societal change. Originating with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1853), the form reached its apex in mid-twentieth-century America with the concentrated publication of multiple protest novels, including John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). The protest novel is widely associated with African American racial politics although there are also instances of protest novels centring class and sexuality. Protest novels elicit empathy from the reader, use ‘shock value’ to outrage readers, and promote ‘indeterminacy of meaning, rich ambiguity, and open-endedness’ to differentiate it from propaganda. The generic need for open-endedness and ambiguity differentiates it from the commercial women’s fiction analysed in this study because ambiguity is antithetical to the happy ending that drives the latter’s social activism by offering hopeful solutions to society’s ills. Like commercial women’s fiction, protest novels have historically been denigrated as inferior literature. Jerry W. Ward argues that ‘[p]rotest was a pejorative code word for work of inferior artistic accomplishment’ throughout the twentieth century. This means that socially activist commercial women’s fiction faces cultural denigration from three different avenues: it is popular, it is written by women, and it risks categorisation as unaesthetic, making it ‘a diversion from, or even perversion of, the pure form of the novel’. Because Keyes has demonstrably faced criticisms for writing popular fiction targeting a female audience, any analysis highlighting the similarities between her style of social activist fiction and protest fiction requires an awareness that the incorporation of politics into Keyes’ fiction could be used as a means to diminish her literary outputs even further.
Although commercial fiction, especially commercial women’s fiction, has the reputation of being nonserious, it holds the potential to influence its readers cognitively and emotionally. Each sub-genre of commercial fiction offers writers different tools through which to spread their message. The different threads of social influence found in commercial genre fiction is starting to be explored in Irish literary studies. For example, Eugene O’Brien analyses the comedy of the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series in Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (2024), Jennifer Mooney explores Louise O’Neill’s YA fiction in Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature: Gender and Power in Louise O’Neill’s Young Adult Fiction (2022), and Ellen Scheible is developing an edited collection centring on Tana French’s crime fiction. Commercial women’s fiction is a noteworthy addition to this research because it is a genre that promotes women’s equality at work and in the home. This is particularly relevant when we consider the rapid change of women’s roles within Irish society across the past 40 years where contraception went from being extremely restricted in the 1980s to being provided free of charge to all Irish women (and people with uteruses) under the age of 35 in 2024, divorce and abortion were legalised via referendum, women started to marry and give birth at a later age, and women entered the work force in significant numbers.
Keyes’ novels mediate social change by ‘critique[ing] prevailing gender constructions and the systems that structure inequality’. A fictional examination of addiction, mental illness, and abortion highlights social justice issues by drawing readers’ attention to structural inequalities, vulnerable and stigmatised populations, and the need for changes in legislation and social policy. In doing so, Keyes follows in the footsteps of the first-wave feminist activist writers for whom fiction ‘became a space in which to depict vividly the problems with the current state of society and in which to imagine a "possible" world in which those conditions were challenged and transformed'. Her depiction of three of the Irish loci of shame – addiction, depression, and abortion – continues this thread of political activism by illustrating that commercial literature can challenge the status quo and, in some cases, facilitate activism through literature.
Marian Keyes and the Politics of Commercial Fiction by Maria Butler is published by UCD Press on 1 October 2026
