A few summers ago I took my mother and my aunt – country girls themselves in the late fifties – on what Edna might call “a little spin” around Connemara. I’d been rereading the trilogy and, as we drove, I couldn’t help recounting funny little scenes for them.
Edna writes about men and women, love, Ireland. Her inner landscape is full of yearning, quivering passion, fanatic hearts. She wears no armour, and the thought of her bravery and the weight of feeling she’s carried around for eight decades, almost breaks me.
We stopped for tea and cake at the Kylemore Abbey café that day. I read aloud the scene of Kate’s great escape from home. She gets a lift with the local rat-catcher, who drives like a lunatic. She’s afraid he’ll put his iron hand on her knee. He tells her she has a fine head of hair on her.
“Would you marry me?”
“No,” I said flatly...
“I’m not a bad match,” he said, “I’ve a pump in the yard, a bull, and a brother a priest. What more could a woman want?”
Other favourites: Claire Keegan and Maeve Brennan
Mary Costello’s latest book is Academy Street, which won the Eason Novel of the Year at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards
