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Irish Revel
- GenresShort Stories
28 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1998
About the author
Edna O'Brien
129 books1,423 followersEdna O’Brien was an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories. She has been hailed as one of the greatest chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. She was the 2011 recipient of the Frank O’Connor Prize, awarded for her short story collection Saints and Sinners. She also received, among other honors, the Irish PEN Award for Literature, the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin, and a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Literary Academy. Her 1960 debut novel, The Country Girls, was banned in her native Ireland for its groundbreaking depictions of female sexuality. Notable works also include August Is a Wicked Month (1965), A Pagan Place (1970), Lantern Slides (1990), and The Light of Evening (2006). O’Brien lived in London until her death.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 23, 2026
Edna O’Brien’s “Come Into the Drawing Room” was published in The New Yorker October 1, 1962, her first story--of twenty-seven--published there, when she was 31, soon after the end of what I understand to be an emotionally abusive marriage, and two years after her first novel, Country Girls, had been banned (and burned) as sexually salacious material. One reviewer called the two main characters “nymphomaniacs” based on their frank expression of desire, but O’Brien always wrote honestly--and to my contemporary mind not at all provocatively--about female desire.
I listened to Rarchel Kushner read it on The New Yorker Fiction podcast, then suted off O'Brien's Collected Stories from my shelf to read it. As usual, the more you read good sghort stories, the better they get, the more complex.
In my late twenties and early thirties I read many of her stories, to study them, as a wannabe writer, her focus in many of them on what it meant to grow up as a girl and woman in fifties Ireland, their lives largely controlled by men--priests, fathers, brothers, husbands. She was drawing on her own smothering experience in her writing. This theme of male domination continues, of course, in this century, in the work of other Irish writers such as Claire Keegan, John Banville (Benjamin Black, his Dr. Quirke series, also set in the fifties) and across the world, of course.
”Come into the Drawing Room, Doris,” retitled “Irish Revel” when it was published in O'Brien's first short story collection, The Love Object (1969), is a story about Mary, a country girl, attending her first dance, where some drunken, pawing guy says this leeringly to her, sort of emblematic of how these men in part undermined any possible romantic joy she might have had about the occasions. She had also hoped to find there an older, married man who had once shown her some affection, though the man had discouraged her further affection, reminding her that he was married. The man thankfully didn't show, though this disappoints her.
Mary misunderstands why she had been invited, finding she has been asked to work at the dance, and is ashamed that she has worn a too fancy dress for the occasion. It’s a quietly heartbreaking story in some ways, but it’s not quite a bitter story, finally, in that she makes decisions about how she will approach these things, in spite of obvious limitations. She escapes home at the end. Poignant, a story of coming of age and awkwardness and men dashing hopes for something different from them.
I listened to Rarchel Kushner read it on The New Yorker Fiction podcast, then suted off O'Brien's Collected Stories from my shelf to read it. As usual, the more you read good sghort stories, the better they get, the more complex.
In my late twenties and early thirties I read many of her stories, to study them, as a wannabe writer, her focus in many of them on what it meant to grow up as a girl and woman in fifties Ireland, their lives largely controlled by men--priests, fathers, brothers, husbands. She was drawing on her own smothering experience in her writing. This theme of male domination continues, of course, in this century, in the work of other Irish writers such as Claire Keegan, John Banville (Benjamin Black, his Dr. Quirke series, also set in the fifties) and across the world, of course.
”Come into the Drawing Room, Doris,” retitled “Irish Revel” when it was published in O'Brien's first short story collection, The Love Object (1969), is a story about Mary, a country girl, attending her first dance, where some drunken, pawing guy says this leeringly to her, sort of emblematic of how these men in part undermined any possible romantic joy she might have had about the occasions. She had also hoped to find there an older, married man who had once shown her some affection, though the man had discouraged her further affection, reminding her that he was married. The man thankfully didn't show, though this disappoints her.
Mary misunderstands why she had been invited, finding she has been asked to work at the dance, and is ashamed that she has worn a too fancy dress for the occasion. It’s a quietly heartbreaking story in some ways, but it’s not quite a bitter story, finally, in that she makes decisions about how she will approach these things, in spite of obvious limitations. She escapes home at the end. Poignant, a story of coming of age and awkwardness and men dashing hopes for something different from them.
March 10, 2023
Its a really good book for a short story, and I understand why she doesnt meet the love interest but I kinda hoped that she did. Maybe I just need to read so more romance books.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 6, 2024
Cute little slice of life from the perspective of a shy, mountain girl attending her first party. Definitely did not go as she hoped.
November 13, 2025
Three and a half stars, rounded up. Slight story in one sense, but insightful and well written.
June 2, 2014
i think that girl isn't actualy experienced about life, so that she struggled a lot especialy in her first party which she planned a lot for it.
June 4, 2014
though it takes your mind a bit away from expectations & opens your imagination to higher thaughts,this story came from a silly unexperienced girl looking forward to her first party...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews