Edna O’Brien’s Neglected Widows and Spinsters

From the witch-like widow on the edges of civilisation to the retired spinster who, after an active but disappointing sexual past, chooses to continue her single life, the celibate women of Edna O’Brien’s fiction have as much to contribute to the author’s career-long examination of the damage done by Irish patriarchy as any of the miserable housewives, resentful mothers, and abused girls who dominate critical analyses of her work. Unlike the many admirable nun characters in O’Brien’s fiction, the women in this study are not consciously renouncing society or deliberately retreating from the world. While they can be vulnerable characters who risk disapproval and even violence, they can also offer alternative models of Irish womanhood, subtle and complex, alternatives not always recognised when the narrator is a young girl and sometimes appreciated too late by more mature narrators and characters.