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.
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...
Impossible to keep lust out of Eden, even though it had not been invented yet. In it comes, like a snake into the garden, because the reader is one of the fallen, and cannot imagine what it is to love without transgression, or taboo. And this makes the story both clear and unimaginable, open and inaccessible.
In 2015, the novelist Catherine Nichols sent the opening pages of the book she was working on to fifty literary agents. She got so little response she decided to shift gender and try as ‘George’ instead. The difference amazed her. ‘A third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.’
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.
One thing Enright’s The Wren, The Wren is sure of is that there is no such thing as completion, or a fresh start. Many of its images are variations on the theme of traces, leftovers, the aspects of self...
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...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.