Cocktail Bar

by Norah Hoult

Originally published in 1950, Cocktail Bar is a brilliantly incisive collection of short stories, far ahead of its time, which illuminates the small, unspoken intricacies of human relationships.

From an immigrant household in London preparing to organise a ‘proper Irish wedding’ to a domineering society matron running her upper-class neighbourhood with an iron fist; from a fashionable young woman wants to be charitable towards her old and poor aunt to an Irish girl must decide between a promising future in America and marriage to her long-time beau.

Throughout these tales, Hoult reveals the contemporary realities of class and disability, office politics and women’s lives, with a sharp gaze and a gentle touch. Beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, exact and unflinching, Cocktail Bar is a modern Irish classic.

Genres: Ireland, Fiction, Irish Literature, Short Stories

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

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

[Laura King · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm absolutely obsessed, and outraged that Hoult is so hard to find in print. Hopefully this is just the beginning of her revival. Anyone interested in Irish stort stories, or writing by forgotten or underappreciated women needs to check this out.

[Felicity · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never even heard of Norah Hoult until a couple of her books were recently republished, and I am amazed that they remained out of print for so long. She writes incisively about the Irish at home and abroad and portrays conventional English middle-class morality with equal conviction. I find her a more versatile and acute writer than Maeve Brennan, who was rescued a few years ago from a similarly undeserved obscurity. If no more of Hoult's titles are reprinted I shall soon be searching the stacks on the university library for more of her neglected novels.