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EDNA O’BRIEN, by Glòria Torner
She is one of the most representative contemporary authors in Ireland as a novelist, playwright, children’s and youth literature, memoirist, scriptwriter, poet and short-story writer.
BIOGRAPHY
Josephine Edna O’Brien was born in 1930, in
Tuamgraney, County Clare, a small rural village in the west of Ireland. The
youngest of four children, she grew up in the atmosphere of Irish National
Catholicism of the 1940s, marked by an alcoholic father, who was a farmer, and
a strict mother in religious practice who considered writing “a path of
perdition”.
After finishing primary school in her village, she was
educated at the Convent of Sisters of Mercy, a boarding school in Galway.
In her 20s, she went to university in Dublin where she graduated in Pharmacy in
1950 and where she worked briefly as an apothecary. In 1952, against her
parents’ wishes, she married the writer Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two
children. They settled in London, where O’Brien turned to writing as a
full-time occupation. Ten years later, in 1962, she escaped from a loveless
marriage and moved to the desolate suburban London where, at least, she felt
free to write.
Her life has been divided between England, where she
has lived for more than 50 years and where she writes, and Ireland, where her
writing comes from and where it endlessly returns, exploring her home country
from a more detached perspective.
Edna O’Brien has publicly acknowledged that James
Joyce’s works, especially A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
were her main inspiration and led her to devote to literature for the rest of
her life.
Her first novel, The Country Girls, written
when she was 30, was published in 1961. It is the history of two girls
who live in a backward and repressive country, especially in rural areas of
Ireland. They grow up in their strict homes, attend a convent school from which
they are expelled and travel to Dublin and London in search of imaginary
opportunities, love and sex. This book was considered a scandal in her country
and she was labelled an enemy of Ireland. Her family felt humiliated by this
book. It was the first instalment of a trilogy, written in autobiographical
style, completed with The Lonely Girl, later published as Girl with
Green Eyes, and Girls in the Married Bliss. Now, these two books are
set in London, and there the protagonists become disillusioned with
marriage and men in general.
She has written more than twenty works of fiction
where the main themes are Ireland and women. Some of them are: The High
Road, Down by the River, In the Forest, The Light of Evening, The
Little Red Chairs, and the last one, written in 2019, Girl, which
was inspired by the Nigerian schoolgirls who were kidnapped by members of Boko
Haram.
Other notable works include a dramatic work about
Virginia Woolf, two important biographies, of James Joyce and Lord Byron, and an
autobiographical essay called Mother Ireland.
She also has published nine short story collections
where their setting varies, although Ireland appears in several of them. One of
them is From Mrs Reinhard and Other Stories, where In the
Hours of Darkness is included.
SUMMARY
The story opens when the protagonist, Lena, a
middle-aged divorced woman, is going on her way from London to Cambridge. She
is accompanying her son, Iain, who is about to start his university studies.
Along the way, she draws a parallelism between her memories of her loneliness
feeling of a day in the rural land surrounding Sydney in Australia, where she
had been before, and this present situation. She describes the English
landscape with these words: “devoid of houses and tillage”, “depopulated land”.
When they are already approaching Cambridge, Iain
observes the university complex with optimism, but Lena, who is imagining the
general atmosphere of study, is intrigued and frightened. She would like to be
in her hotel bedroom reading the novels of Jane Austen, her favourite writer.
She reflects on the future that awaits her: she will remain alone because Iain
is the youngest child, the last one who lived with her. The pessimism and the
loneliness for her future begins now, with these words, “bereft of her
children”.
Arriving at the hotel in Cambridge, Lena observes
things she didn’t expect: the hotel is near to a car park, ruined, with a lot
of bars and a general confusion and noise, a “big ramshackle place”. When the
porter, who takes Lena to her room, loses his way, she gets dismayed. She
also dislikes her single room because it isn’t a familiar looking room and the
furnishing represents everything she hates. At that moment, she would like to
be at home, and she pronounces the sentence “Bad place to die”.
Then, wanting a cup of tea, Lena goes to the lobby
where there are other guests. Her new impression is more negative than the
previous ones. There is a lot of confusion in the lobby, full of shopping bags
that prevent a fluid passage.
Later, in the College, she thinks she is watching a
scene not of academic life, but of a commercial life, and the people there
don’t look like scholars or academics, they look like salesmen or tradesmen.
After a while, Lena, her son, a young professor, two first course students and
their host meet to have dinner. Lena says the meat is “lovely”, even though it
is not true, and all the dinner is not very successful. The conversation turns
to a professor with peculiar and strange habits, or about the reasons why the
students are expelled before the end of the course; but Lena, however, is not
listening because she is concentrated on the beauty of the evening outside.
Although the dinner has started early, their host is the first to leave. Then
Lena goes to the host’s bedroom, where she has left her coat before. There he
starts talking about the reasons why he has never married. She gets frightened
when she looks at a violent image: a painting of a wolf with a man’s eyes
hanging on the wall. At that moment, she impulsively kisses the host.
After dinner, Lena and her son stay for a while
outside, walking on the street. They part at her hotel, where Lena says good
night to Iain. They decide to visit the town the following morning because they
know the time to separate is approaching.
This first descriptive part of the story, the adventure of moving house, has become a desolate experience with a dark atmosphere. She has imagined a better introduction for her son, but now everything seems to work against her, and this second part will be like a nightmare.
Lena goes to her room, but instead of the quiet room she has booked, she begins to hear loud noises and discovers there is a party going on. She leaves her hotel to find a place to sleep in her son’s, but when she gets to the College, she sees a young man wearing a small motorcyclist’s leather jacket coming towards her; at first, she doesn’t recognize him, but then she realizes that he is Iain; he’s going “in search of adventure”. They talk and joke for a time, and they say good night again.
She goes back to her noisy hotel, and the manager asks
her if she would like another hotel; she decides to move to another one, but
this second new hotel is worse than the first one. She finds the porter with an
aggressive Dalmatian dog; he leads her to a room where another woman is
sleeping, and both are annoyed by the mistake. At last, she arrives to an empty
room very similar to the one she has just left. It’s impossible for Lena
to relax and sleep, although she decides to take sleeping pills. Waiting till
morning in this room, she spots a notice above the mirror with an amusing
comment, and, after that, she sits in a chair and waits for a moment. Finally,
she decides to spend the night in the armchair.
Curious and surrealist ending of the story!
Two remarks
The importance of the title: “Darkness” means in a
literal level “at night”, but in a symbolic level it means “difficult period”.
There are also some symbolic images like “the wolf with a man’s eyes”, “a
drunken woman holding up a broken silver shoe”, or “the Dalmatian
dog”.
As the story is written in autobiographical style and
the narrator uses the Lena’s point of view along all the story, the events and
feelings of past, the feelings and facts of present and the thoughts of future
of Lena are present all around the story.
QUESTIONS
-Why does the narrator think of Jane Austen?
-The narrator feels sad because she’s leaving her son
at the University. Do you think
her son feels the same?
-When you travel, what do you prefer, renting an
apartment or staying in a hotel? Tell us your reasons why.
-Did you ever have a full English breakfast? How did
you like it?
-How would you like to be greeted in a new place, as
for instance, job, school, club…?
-In your view, why did the narrator kiss the College host?
-Did you have a bad experience with pranks at school /
work? In your opinion, do they have to be forbidden?
-What are the advantages of studying in a boarding
school?
-What do you need to sleep comfortably? What do you do
if you can’t sleep? Do you take any pills?
-What is the relation between the title and the story?
VOCABULARY
tillage, tawny, bleached, predicament, bereft, props,
toddler, lobby, ramshackle, buxom, spatters, spurned, china, freshmen, sorted
... out, johns, touch and go, cockerel, seed, sherbet, grouse, tackle, game,
demurred, sprouts, raspberry chantilly, frayed paisley, cruise, forborne, knit
up the ravelled, laced, rusticated