LIFE:

Born in a small village in County Clare. She studies at the local school and in convent but she runs away from this lifestyle entering the Pharmacy University in Dublin. In 1952 she moves to London with her husband. After divorce remains in London to educate her children. From 1986 she teaches creative writing at City College of City University in New York. Among her works: Johnny I Hardly Knew You, 1977, The High Road, 1988, The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue, 1989, Time and Tide, 1990, and recently the novel Down by the River, 1997. Among numerous series of tales deserve mention A Scandalous Woman, 1974, A Fanatic Heart, 1984, and Lantern Slides, 1990. Topics of her work are women who love and suffer, described with a dry style, without falling in sentimentalism. Her heroines are tormented women, overwhelmed by guilty feelings, victims of a churchy education or rebellious, unconventional, provocative, in open conflict with the atmosphere in which they have grown. Her novels in the 60s arouse scandal for this sincerity in reporting feminine desires and little "orthodox" behaviours.
She has also written screenplays for movies and television series and has worked for many newspapers among which "The New Yorker", "The Ladies' Home Journal" and "Cosmopolitan".

SUGGESTED WORKS:

Girls in their married bliss 1989
It tells the adventures of Kate and Baba two Irish girls who live in London. Kate is fragile, insecure, incline to depression and to pessimism, she has a wedding broken into fragments behind her and she can't construct a new independent life. Baba is instead a funny, realistic and married with a rich entrepreneur girl. The novel is carried out on two different narrative plans: the dramas of Kate are narrated in third person while Baba tells in first person.

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