Novel
Judith Hearne
Brian Moore · 1955
Synopsis
Belfast, the fifties. Judith Hearne, in her forties, a Catholic, spent her youth caring for a demanding aunt; she is left with a meagre income and a few piano lessons. She moves into a new boarding house on Camden Street. On Sundays she takes tea with the O'Neills, who dread her visits, and in the evening she drinks alone. At the boarding house lives James Madden, the landlady's brother, back from New York after thirty years. He thinks she is rich; she thinks he is in the hotel trade.
Context
The author wrote it in Canada, where he had lived since 1948, returning through writing to the city he had left. About ten American publishers turned it down before a London house accepted it, at Diana Athill's insistence. It appeared in London in 1955 under its heroine's name alone; the 1956 American edition gave it the long title, which British reissues adopted after Jack Clayton's film, with Maggie Smith, in 1987. Its author considered this book his first real novel.
Who it is for
A dark novel about a woman's loneliness, in which the heroine's Catholic faith plays a large part.
Prizes and reception
Winner of the Authors' Club First Novel Award on publication, it has remained the best known of its author's books.
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