Norah Hoult's `Poor Women!': A Critical Edition

by Norah Hoult, Kathleen P. Costello-Sullivan (Editor)

Irish author (Eleanor) Norah Hoult (1898-1984) traveled in prominent literary circles and corresponded actively with some of the leading Irish authors of her time, including Brigid Brophy, Sean O'Casey, and Sean O'Faolain. Critics today compare her not only to O'Faolain and Frank O'Connor, but also to novelists Kate O'Brien and Edna O'Brien. Despite her reputation and a forty-four year publishing career, however, Hoult and her work remain surprisingly neglected.

This edition rectifies this critical oversight and introduces Hoult's short story collection, 'Poor Women!', to a new generation of readers. 'Poor Women!' displays Hoult's subtlety and humor as an author and her nature as a keen witness to human frailty. In these stories, Hoult unflaggingly highlights the restrictions imposed on her characters by society and its institutions: she thus provides a window into the social, literary and political milieu from which she hails.

Largely cited for its engagement with women's and religious issues, 'Poor Women!' thus also displays a keen awareness of wider historical issues like the challenges of war and of cultural identity construction. Her incisive portraits capture the emotional paralysis of her characters and their self-delusions. Such thematic and stylistic emphases invite further comparison to better-known contemporary Irish literary giants like James Joyce and Mary Lavin.

250 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1928

About the author

Norah ‘Ella’ Hoult was born in Dublin in 1898. Her mother, Margaret O’Shaughnessy, was a spirited Irish-Catholic girl who eloped with a Protestant English architect named Powis Hoult when she was 21. After Norah and her brother were orphaned they were sent to live with their father’s relations in England, where they went to school. Norah Hoult was a journalist for the Sheffield Daily Telegraph and then moved to London to work on a magazine, becoming a full-time writer after her first book, Poor Women (1928), was published. She lived in Dublin from 1931-7 (and was briefly married to a quantity surveyor) and then in New York; in 1939 she settled in London, living in Bayswater, not far from Violet Hunt upon whom Claire Temple in There Were No Windows (1944) is modelled. Between 1928 and 1972 she published twenty-five books; in 1957 she returned to live in Ireland, and died there in 1984.

Reviews

[Senne · Rating 5 out of 5]

how are they supposed to live love laugh in those conditions?

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norah Hoult, one of my favourite recent discoveries, is remarkable for her generous treatment of all her characters, however unsympathetic they may appear. The 4-star rating is for her text, which is not well served by this inadequately copy-edited 'critical' edition. My suspicions were aroused in the introduction, in which the editor exaggerates the Irishness of the Dublin-born Hoult, ignoring the Anglocentric counter-evidence of this work, and elevates her to the company of 'literary giants such as James Joyce and Mary Lavin' (2). Strange bedfellows indeed! This edition appears to have been produced for the benefit of high-school students unfamiliar with early twentieth-century writing. Hoult's dry humour, which seems to have eluded the editor, has evidently migrated to the footnotes that are mostly redundant and occasionally risible, as in the confusion of 'yoke' with 'yolk' (n.19), and the speculation that Mrs Johnson's bad hair day - 'she still fought shy of shingling' (Hoult, 113) - is 'likely a reference to the skin disease shingles' (n.48). A reader in need of contextual explanation of the period details would be better informed by an internet search engine. I hope that the Dublin publishers of two of her other works will consider producing an unannotated edition of Poor Women! for poor readers who can't afford the inflated price of this pseudo-scholarly chronic edition.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Equally enjoyable as it was painful in its reminder that men are shit and have always been shit!!