The Novels
The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue draws upon the author’s Irish past to delineate the experiences of two women fatally involved in the lives of men. Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan are best friends in spite of the fact that they are opposites. They grow up together in Ireland and eventually make their way to England. As they move away from their native land, the girls face the inevitable complexities of adulthood, so that Ireland becomes a kind of paradise, an Eden of innocence to which they cannot return.
In The Country Girls, Kate, an only child, is the narrator. She grows up on a farm in the west of Ireland. Her mother has been a martyr to her father’s abusive drunkenness. Baba, Kate’s friend, is the veterinarian’s daughter. She is coy, pretty, and malicious. From the beginning, Kate has a male protector, Jack Holland, to shelter her from the threatening world, represented by her father. Later, her significant lovers are all old enough to be her father.
Kate wins a scholarship to a convent school, while Baba pays to go, saying, “It’s nicer when you pay.” When Kate is still a child, her mother drowns, and Kate goes to live with Baba’s family. When Kate goes home for the summer, her father loses the farm. By the age of fourteen, she has fallen in love with “Mr. Gentleman” (Jacques de Maurier), who treats her kindly. At Christmas, during a break from the convent school, Mr. Gentleman confesses his love for her. Jack Holland also says that he wants to marry her.
For the next three years, Baba contemplates running away from the convent school. She is a poor student, while Kate is a good one and a favorite of the nuns. Then Kate gets into trouble and Baba formulates a plan to get them expelled. They write a vulgar note and leave it in chapel as if it had fallen out of their prayer books. Although they are ashamed of it, they both sign their names. The note concerns Sister Mary (one of Kate’s favorite nuns) and Father Tom, the chaplain. The girls are indeed expelled, and Baba’s father realizes that poor Kate has always been “Baba’s tool.”
Baba is sent to Dublin for a commercial course, and Kate follows, becoming a shop clerk, though she could have used her scholarship at another convent. They take a room, and Baba is ecstatic to be free and in the city. They go on a date with two middle-aged men; the evening ends badly, but Mr. Gentleman shows up to save it.
Baba and Kate become strangers, as Kate sees Mr. Gentleman often and Baba continues to date one of the middle-aged men. After Baba develops tuberculosis and goes to a sanatorium, Mr. Gentleman proposes that he and Kate go away to Vienna to make love (they have only undressed for each other). As they plan their leave-taking, Kate is so excited that she forgets the fourth anniversary of her mother’s death. The novel concludes with Kate waiting in vain for Mr. Gentleman. She finally receives a telegram saying that his wife is having a nervous breakdown and Kate’s father has ordered that he must not see her.
The Lonely Girl opens with Kate still working as a grocery clerk. Again, the story is told through her voice. She is a romantic, bookish sort, about to embark on “a different life.” She has not seen Mr. Gentleman for two years. Baba and Kate are back together in their boardinghouse and have no steady men. There is much socializing,...
(This entire section contains 1621 words.)
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going to dances, and crashing various affairs. At one such event, Kate meets Eugene Gaillard, a maker of documentary films, who seems contemptuous of the world. Kate thinks that Eugene has class, and he makes her feel soft and lovely; he reminds her of Mr. Gentleman. After a chance encounter, Kate unsuccessfully attempts to see him again “coincidentally” and in desperation invites him to tea. He says that he does not want to get involved, but he asks her to dinner and a relationship develops.
In The Country Girls, Kate seems an Anna Karenina figure, an impression Eugene confirms in The Lonely Girl by noting that she resembles Leo Tolstoy’s heroine. This is not the last time he makes a literary reference that she does not understand (she thinks Anna is a girlfriend or an actress). Eventually, Kate discovers that Eugene is married, but she still sees him on a weekly basis. He is worldly, sophisticated, and literary. Kate, still a virgin, sleeps with him without having sex. She is afraid of it, and as he departs for London, he leaves her with a sex manual.
Both Kate and her father receive notes warning against an involvement with a “dirty foreigner,” and her father comes to take her home. She resists, but he has his way. At home, she has a bitter confrontation with Mr. Gentleman, the townspeople seem to shun her, and the parish priest has a talk with her. She eludes them all and enlists Jack Holland to help her escape. From Dublin, she sends a wire to Eugene saying that she’s coming and one to her aunt back home saying that she’s gone to England. She insists on staying with Eugene, and her father arrives with a party of men in order to bring her home. She hides while the invaders assault Eugene and are then driven away by the housekeeper’s shotgun.
Finally, now twenty-one, Kate makes love with Eugene. Although he cannot actually wed her, there is a kind of marriage when he gives her a wedding band. She is shocked and terrified at his insistence that he will give her babies. She loves being in bed with Eugene, but domestic life seems boring—especially after her high times with Baba, who soon visits with a male friend in tow. A second visit, from Kate’s father and the bishop, is rebuffed by Eugene. He mocks her Catholic faith, and Kate suddenly feels that he is too old and cynical for her. She is awkward and uncomfortable around his friends and feels threatened by the impending arrival of his wife. Kate feels wounded by not being married and becomes increasingly jealous of the letters and telegrams from Eugene’s wife.
Eventually, the couple grow apart, and Kate leaves with Baba for England. In London, Kate works at a delicatessen and studies English at London University, finally understanding Eugene’s literary allusions.
Girls in Their Married Bliss is set in London and is narrated in part by Baba. In less than a year, Eugene is back in Kate’s life: They are married, Kate is pregnant, and they are going to live in the country. Meanwhile, Baba meets an Irish builder, Frank Durack, a rich alcoholic slob of a man, whom she marries when she is twenty-five.
Kate returns to London and has a romantic but doomed affair with a man who is married and has children. Chapter 2 switches to omniscient narration as Baba plans for her and Kate to leave their husbands as soon as they have acquired enough furs and diamonds.
With Kate’s marriage in collapse, Baba takes over the narration of the novel again. Frank introduces her to his new friends, including a poet, a drummer, and an actor. Baba prepares to “entertain” Harvey, the drummer. There follows a hilarious seduction scene, with Harvey drumming Baba’s body into a frenzy of frustration. Baba gets pregnant as a result of her fling with the drummer. Failing to find an abortionist, she tries, unsuccessfully, to abort herself with castor oil. When she tells Frank of her pregnancy, he knows immediately that the child is not his and threatens to beat her. Baba, as usual, is undaunted, and Frank tearfully accepts her—and the baby.
Then Eugene appears, demanding the return of his son, but Kate and the boy, Cash, are gone. Baba again belittles Kate by musing that she is “probably out drowning herself” (a foreboding image). Kate eventually capitulates, however, and hands over Cash. She now gets a room for herself.
Kate goes to a psychiatrist and admits that she thinks she destroys people with her weakness. She moves to a small row house so that she can have Cash with her, but he longs to go home. At a party, Kate meets a man named Roger and has an unsatisfactory sexual encounter with him. Eugene takes Cash away. Kate’s solicitor does not provide her with much hope, and Kate resolves to have no more children. When Baba goes to see her after Kate has been sterilized, Kate “was looking like someone of whom too much had been cut away.”
In Epilogue, Kate is drowned, like her mother, and it is a fitting end for both of them: In life, they were drowned in longing. There is a meditation on Kate’s earlier attempted suicide in a railroad station and her fantasy of being saved by a Prince Charming (again, she is an Anna Karenina figure). Told in Baba’s voice—which is as profane as ever—Epilogue opens with a jaundiced view of a romantic couple. Baba is both jealous and angry at Kate for being a romantic to the end. Sex with her husband has become a bore for Baba, and she contemplates another “harmless” fling while on holiday, just before being called home because Frank has had another emasculating stroke. The story ends badly for both Kate and Baba, but it appears that Baba, with her cheerful cynicism, will survive this contemporary war of the sexes.
