Richard Ford calls the short story the “high wire act of literature”, but my favourite description comes from Irish writer Mary Lavin, who described it as an “arrow in flight”. The phrase captures the brevity and epiphany of the form and some of the best practitioners – from Chekhov to Lorrie Moore, Katherine Mansfield to Kevin Barry – have fired it into unfamiliar places, soaring over a multitude of themes and ideas. Some are led by characters, others play with language or tone (who can forget the bone chill after reading Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery?), but all manage to distill something terrifying or tender or utterly distinct in just a couple of thousand words.

In the late 1990s, while studying English at university, I took a course on the Irish short story. The prescribed text, The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories, edited by William Trevor, contained early Gaelic folk tales and 39 short stories. We had another mandatory course on literary theory and – hurrah! – an introduction to feminism. Through a burgeoning exposure to Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, I noticed that only seven of the 39 stories were by women. A scan of the library shelves revealed that Trevor’s anthology wasn’t the worst offender when it came to gender imbalance. Almost every collection was edited by a man, and each book I opened – including anthologies from all around the world – was heavily weighted towards male writers. Irish offerings were no different: pick up an anthology of Irish short stories published between 1950 and 1990, and a familiar pattern emerges. Many anthologies had no women, others had just two or three female writers, and invariably these were the brilliant troika (before that word meant something else in contemporary Ireland) of Mary Lavin, Edna O’Brien and Elizabeth Bowen. In The Lonely Voice, his 1962 study of the short story, Frank O’Connor wrote that the form’s “submerged population groups” were silenced and marginalised. Looking at the lack of women represented in anthologies over the decades, women could have been included as just such a fringe group.

Then in 2001, I discovered Cutting the Night in Two: Short Stories by Irish Women Writers. Edited by Evelyn Conlon and Hans-Christian Oeser, it featured 34 writers, living and dead – but all female. It proved a point that those library anthologies missed: women writers had been there all along, writing away through the centuries, but simply weren’t included in the same numbers as their male counterparts. Why? Maria Edgeworth was well known for her fiction as well as her social commentary, and Charlotte Riddell published more than 50 books, including many short stories. What of Mary Beckett, Maeve Kelly, Teresa Deevy or Juanita Casey?

Visibility still remains an issue, as VIDA statistics, Joanna Walsh’s #readwomen campaign and this piece by Kamila Shamshie suggest, but in compiling The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, I was spoilt for choice. Writers such as Eimear McBride, Mary Costello, Belinda McKeon, Lucy Caldwell and Lisa McInerney (all featured in the book) are part of a palpable energy in the new wave of Irish writing. They all feel the pragmatic pull of the novel, but are still committed to the shorter form.

Several factors ultimately went into the selection of the final 30 stories. I could have chosen 100 women, but my publisher was understandably stubborn about the page count. In opting for deceased writers, I tried to find stories that I both admired, and hadn’t already been heavily anthologised (I cheated in choosing The Demon Lover because it’s Elizabeth Bowen’s best story). All work by the 22 living writers is new and unpublished: writers were given a word count but were free to write on any subject, so there is emigration, pregnancy, loss, capitalism, motherhood, ghosts, sex, painting, the American frontier and more.

Titles are tricky, but I hope The Long Gaze Back – a quote from Maeve Brennan’s novella The Visitor – captures the lengthy arc of Irish women’s writing. For it is a long arc: there are 218 years between the oldest and youngest writers in the collection. In some ways this anthology is a triptych: deceased classic writers (Somerville & Ross, Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavin) sit alongside feted names from the last decade (Anne Enright) and the next generation of new voices. There are overlaps and patterns, as well as a faithfulness to the canon that came before, and a desire to map new places.

An anthology is a cultural snapshot, and a book must have an endpoint, which is difficult when sharp new voices – Sara Baume, Danielle McLaughlin – keep announcing themselves. Irish women’s writing has never been more expansive, but it started centuries ago, something that The Long Gaze Back attempts to acknowledge, while reinforcing the breadth and brilliance of the contemporary Irish short story.