Author | Brian Moore |
---|---|
Cover artist | Heather Standring |
Publisher | Andre Deutsch |
Publication date | 1955 |
Publication place | United Kingdom |
Media type | |
Pages | 223 |
OCLC | 625517 |
Preceded by | A Bullet for My Lady (as Bernard Mara) (1955) |
Followed by | This Gun for Gloria (as Bernard Mara) (1956) |
Judith Hearne (later republished as The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne after the film of that name, based on the novel), was regarded by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore as his first novel. The book was published in 1955 after Moore had left Ireland and was living in Canada. It was rejected by 10 American publishers, then was accepted by a British publisher. [1] Diana Athill's memoir Stet (2000) has information about the publishing of Judith Hearne. [2]
Set in Belfast in the 1950s, Judith Hearne has been described as "a sensitive study of a middle-aged alcoholic woman in drab Belfast and her desperate last attempts at finding love and companionship". [3] Ann Leary, reviewing the book for NPR, calls it "a short book about a lifetime of longing" and says "Moore uses brilliant economy in his writing; it's as if words are as scarce and precious as sunshine in this gloomy section of postwar Belfast". [4] According to Colm Tóibín, the book "is full of Joycean moments... it takes from ‘Clay’, the most mysterious story in Dubliners, the idea of a single, middle-aged woman visiting a family and finding both comfort and humiliation there". [5] Robert Fulford, writing in Canada's The Globe and Mail, describes it as "a bleak post-Catholic novel" that depicts "a desolate life, stripped of warming humanity". [6]
Moore won the Authors' Club First Novel Award [7] and the Beta Sigma Phi award [8] for this work, although it was not his first novel.
A film based on the book, but with the story relocated to Dublin, was released in 1987 with Maggie Smith in the title role.
The book was republished by HarperCollins, under the title The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, on 16 July 2007 in the Harper Perennial Modern Classics series ( ISBN 0007255616; ISBN 978-0007255610).
In November 2019, BBC Arts included Judith Hearne on its list of the 100 most influential novels. [9]
Commenting in the Belfast Telegraph , writer Carlo Gébler stated: " [T]he author communicates her specificity (she is a lonely, damaged, needy, alcoholic, Catholic middle-aged woman who yearns for love) with enormous tenderness and precision." His technique, he added: "combines third person omniscient narrative with first person stream of consciousness material: by combining the two (and he does this deftly) Moore...tells his story and he allows us unfettered access to the private interior world of the people he is writing about." [10]
Brian Moore, was a novelist and screenwriter from Northern Ireland who emigrated to Canada and later lived in the United States. He was acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland during and after the Second World War, in particular his explorations of the inter-communal divisions of The Troubles, and has been described as "one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel". He was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1975 and the inaugural Sunday Express Book of the Year award in 1987, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Moore also wrote screenplays and several of his books were made into films.
Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester's marriage from the point of view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress. Antoinette Cosway is Rhys's version of Brontë's "madwoman in the attic". Antoinette's story is told from the time of her youth in Jamaica, to her unhappy marriage to an English gentleman, Mr. Rochester, who renames her Bertha, declares her mad, takes her to England, and isolates her from the rest of the world in his mansion. Wide Sargasso Sea explores the power of relationships between men and women and discusses the themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as Antoinette is caught in a white, patriarchal society in which she fully belongs neither to Europe nor to Jamaica.
Bernard MacLaverty is an Irish fiction writer and novelist. His novels include Cal and Grace Notes. He has written five books of short stories.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
The Master is a novel by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. His fifth novel, it received the International Dublin Literary Award, the Stonewall Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year and, in France, Le prix du meilleur livre étranger in 2005. It was also shortlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize.
The South is a 1990 novel by Irish writer Colm Tóibín.
Diana Athill was a British literary editor, novelist and memoirist who worked with some of the greatest writers of the 20th century at the London-based publishing company Andre Deutsch Ltd.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a 1987 British drama film made by HandMade Films Ltd. and United British Artists (UBA) starring Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. It was directed by Jack Clayton and produced by Richard Johnson and Peter Nelson, with George Harrison and Denis O'Brien as executive producers. The music score was by Georges Delerue and the cinematography by Peter Hannan.
Patrick Hicks is an Irish-American novelist, poet, and Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University.
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Brooklyn is a 2009 novel by Irish author Colm Tóibín. It won the 2009 Costa Novel Award, was shortlisted for the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award and was longlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. In 2012, The Observer named it as one of "The 10 best historical novels".
The Empty Family is a collection of short stories by Irish writer Colm Tóibín. It was published in the UK in October 2010 and was released in the US in January 2011.
The Doctor's Wife is a novel by Northern Irish-Canadian writer Brian Moore, published in 1976. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it tells the story of Sheila Redden, a doctor's wife from Belfast, who takes an American lover eleven years her junior while in Paris. She then separates from both her husband and her new lover.
Sam Hanna Bell was a Scottish-born Northern Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and broadcaster.
Brooklyn is a 2015 romantic period drama film directed by John Crowley and written by Nick Hornby, based on the 2009 novel by Colm Tóibín. A co-production between the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada, it stars Saoirse Ronan in the lead role, with Emory Cohen, Domhnall Gleeson, Jim Broadbent, and Julie Walters in supporting roles. The plot follows Eilis Lacey, a young Irishwoman who immigrates to Brooklyn in the early 1950s to find employment. After building a life there, she is drawn back to her home town of Enniscorthy and has to choose where she wants to forge her future. Principal photography began in April 2014 with three weeks of filming in Ireland, which were followed by four weeks in Montreal, Quebec; only two days of filming took place in Brooklyn, one of which was spent at the beach in Coney Island.
The 2013 Booker Prize for Fiction was awarded on 15 October 2013 to Eleanor Catton for her novel The Luminaries. A longlist of thirteen titles was announced on 23 July, and these were narrowed down to a shortlist of six titles, announced on 10 September. The jury was chaired by Robert Macfarlane, who was joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Natalie Haynes, Martha Kearney, and Stuart Kelly. The shortlist contained great geographical and ethnic diversity, with Zimbabwean-born NoViolet Bulawayo, Eleanor Catton of New Zealand, Jim Crace from England, Indian American Jhumpa Lahiri, Canadian-American Ruth Ozeki and Colm Tóibín of Ireland.
Áine Ní Mhuirí is an Irish actress. She began her career at the Damer Theatre, later working in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Áine is a fluent Irish language speaker.
The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories is a collection of short stories by Northern Ireland-born novelist Brian Moore. It was published in the United Kingdom by Turnpike Books in 2020, 21 years after his death.
Brian Moore's early fiction refers to the seven pulp fiction thrillers, published between 1951 and 1957, that the acclaimed novelist Brian Moore wrote before he achieved success and international recognition with Judith Hearne (1955) and The Feast of Lupercal (1957).
The reveal kickstarts the BBC's year-long celebration of literature.