Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for The Gathering. Her latest novel, Actress, came out in 2020. She has written in the LRB about the long afterlife of the HeLa cells taken from a woman about to die of cervical cancer, her grandmother’s friendship with James Joyce’s sister, and in ‘Antigone in Galway’, about the fate of the troublesome women sent to Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.
I pass Sandymount Strand on the train into town. I might think of Joyce and Nora, but more often about Stephen’s encounter with the tide. I might also briefly consider eternity – it is hard not to, given the stretch of the view – or the drowned man at the end of ‘Proteus’, with the tiny fish darting in and out of his buttoned trouser fly.
When my grandfather died of a heart attack in 1927, he was the father of three young children and did not know that a fourth child, my mother, was on the way. This strangeness – the growth of a baby after the death of its parent – was both tragic and miraculous. It made my mother feel odd about her existence, I think, which is not the same as feeling odd about herself. She was...
You have not experienced Irish theatre until you have seen a show that involves a ferry, rain, stone-walled fields and the keen, mild interest of the Aran Islanders, who have great good manners and no shortage of self-esteem. It can’t be easy being the object of a century of tourist curiosity, but these people have a steady gaze. The world comes to them and then it leaves. Somehow it...
In the fourth novel in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead sequence, the eponymous Jack spends a long night alone with his thoughts. ‘After a while,’ he observes, ‘light will reveal itself in a very dark room, not quite as a mist, as something more particulate, as if the slightest breath had lifted the finest dust into the stillest air.’ This recalls Milton’s...
Last year, I spoke to a young female doctor who has on occasion been sexually assaulted or insulted by men under her care. What are they thinking? One answer is that they think she is a nurse and that they are, by long-standing comic tradition, entitled to molest nurses. Another is that they can’t bear to be so vulnerable: it is more important to them to make a woman uneasy than it...
Anne Enright talks to Andrew O’Hagan about her latest novel, Actress, and other works.
Anne Enright delivers her lecture on how corruptions of the Adam and Eve story have poisoned relations between men and women.
Anne Enright introduces her book The Green Road, reveals what men ask her at dinner parties, and decides what superpower she would like.
Anne Enright reads two stories from her collection Taking Pictures and takes questions from the audience.
If Anne Enright’s stories took a physical form, I imagine they would be a well-dressed woman screaming into a silk pillowcase. Which is to say, I love them.
Hegel believed that happiness was largely confined to the private life, a view that would scarcely survive a reading of the modern novel. A lot of fiction since the early 20th century takes it...
The Gathering – Anne Enright’s fourth novel, and her best – is aware of its heritage, of the books that have gone before it. It makes use of familiar signals and motifs. It is...
Both these outstanding women novelists have decided, with deliberate and rewarding feminist intent, to resuscitate and make central the lives of women whose stories have been overshadowed by the...
In Anne Enright’s collection The Portable Virgin (published in 1991) the first story is about Cathy, who works in the handbag department of a large Dublin store. Cathy classifies the...
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