Broderick and a Scottish Presbyterian mother, she was baptised a Catholic but brought up in "the Anglican compromise" (Church of Ireland).
[1] She went up to Trinity College Dublin in 1958 where her contemporaries included the poets Michael Longley, Derek Mahon and Eavan Boland.
In Jan 2012 Queen's recognised her importance to the academic life of the university with the unveiling of a portrait of Longley in the Great Hall.
[4] At the Yeats Summer School in 1993 she attacked The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing for 'a propensity to censorship and an obsession with colonialism', developing those arguments in her 1994 collection of essays The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, an extended critique of nationalism in Irish writing.
[6] Longley famously stated that Irish history ought to be treated by "raising a monument to Amnesia, and forgetting where we put it".