Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for The Gathering. Her latest novel, The Wren, The Wren, came out in 2023. 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. Attention: Selected Essays was published in November.
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.’
In September, the Irish government held a state funeral for the exhumed remains of Thomas Kent, a rebel and a patriot who was executed in 1916 and buried in the yard of what is now Cork Prison, at the rear of Collins Barracks, once the Victoria Barracks. His coffin was first removed to the garrison church, where thousands of people filed past to pay their respects. The funeral echoed the reinterment of Roger Casement – thrown in a lime pit in Pentonville Prison in 1916 and repatriated in 1965 – when Eamon de Valera got out of his sickbed to attend and a million people lined the route.
When the queen came to Ireland in May 2011 a number of the great, good and merely deserving were locked in the 1937 reading room of Trinity College Dublin for two hours without their mobile phones, before being allowed into the beautiful Long Room of the Old Library to await her arrival. The ratio of men to women was about the same as you find at the front of the plane – five to one...
In September 1954, my parents went to Edinburgh on their honeymoon. There is a picture of them taken in Princes Street Gardens, in front of the view of the Castle, my mother is wearing her white fun fur jacket, my father is wearing a big smile; they look full of their moment and altogether content. No one knows why they went to Edinburgh, they just wanted to, and after that they went to Lourdes. My mother prayed at the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette, and her prayers must have been answered, because two Enrights went out there, but three Enrights came back.
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...
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.
H egel 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...
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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