...English, also one of its strangest and least classifiable. Born in Dublin in the last year of the nineteenth century, her historical reach comprehended much of the twentieth, her novels encompassing the Irish War of Independence and the decline of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, of which she was a member, the depredations of World War II, particularly London in the Blitz, and the technological developments of the post-war period, in which her work delights. Yet her writing has too often suffered from being pigeonholed into a genteel brand of conventional realism, drawing-room melodrama for middlebrows, described by her biographer Victoria Glendinning as "what happened after Bloomsbury ... the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark." Neither, on the other hand, do highly-theorized recent attempts to read her work as pre-empting poststructuralism ring entirely true, even if this argument is artificially freighted towards her later work, particularly the wildly disjointed and self-reflexive final novel Eva Trout (1968). One of the many strengths of Ellmann's brilliant study is its even-handedness, its refusal to dictate or close down avenues...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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