Trespassers by Julia O'Faolain

Author:Julia O'Faolain [Julia O’Faolain]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571294947
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-11-27T05:00:00+00:00

My friends in UCD were not Holy Joes, but, apart from the handsome eighteenth-century Newman House at 86 Stephen’s Green, the place was drab. Notoriously, there would be no contraceptives available for years to come. Men and women were careful with each other, and the Fifties were impoverished years. Meanwhile, our summer jaunts abroad only served to show Modern Language students how much livelier things were in places other than Ireland, where a post-Famine fear of the woman who ‘gets herself pregnant’, so that the man is forced to marry her and divide the wretched bit of family land, survived subliminally into my time and made it a grim place for both sexes. Men drank.

Trained in this nursery, those of us who got abroad scrutinised foreign men for similar doubts regarding us, were circumspect in our dealings with them and, being recognised as wife-material – des filles bien or ragazze per bene – attracted quite a few offers of marriage. One or two girls I knew accepted, and I later wrote a novella, Man in the Cellar, about the imagined experience of marrying an Italian. Later still, an Irish woman who had fled from such a marriage told me I’d got it more or less right. I was pleased but deserved less credit than she thought, for in my winter in Rome I had had a fidanzato – a less serious connection than a fiancé – on whose more furtive doings I received reports from two Irishmen, whose solidarity with me trumped their male connivance.

*

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.