Life
1958- ; b. Dublin; ed. Sacred Heart Convent, Mount Anville, and UCD (English);
community education project teacher, Dublin; stories in Irish Press,
Irish Times, Evening Herald, Raven Introduction 4,
and Regent International Magazine; also first novel, Breaking
Out (1996).
Works
Breaking Out (Belfast: Blackstaff 1996), 193pp.
Notes
Blackstaff Catalogue (1996) gives an account of Breaking Out
(1996): Eleanor Leyden, rebel and ‘girl that spells trouble’;
communist parents killed in car crash, and she herself maimed; fostered
with O’Driscolls; stifled by their middle-class Catholic values;
becomes stonemason and seeks solace in forbidden love affair that entraps
her further; flight inspired by two women, Aunt Katherine and precocious
school-friend Louise, with whom she share the ‘exhilaration of departure’
in France and Greece; amid shift of relations towards rivalry and desire
learns to face the world ‘herself, clear, alone’.
Aubrey Malone, Books Ireland (Sept. 1996), p.226, noting stilted conversation and stylistic excesses: ‘the characters in this book speak in quotations; ... impressive debut, nonetheless’.
Blackstaff
Book of Short Stories (Belfast: Blackstaff 1988) contains "First
Fish" and "Spinning Sisters".
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)