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Black Baby

Clare Boylan

A touching story of companionship from one of the unsung heroes of contemporary Irish literature, Black Baby is a complex novel that traces the tragic and comic effects of human loneliness. Alice is an elderly spinster whose Christmas speech to her nephews ends with "I am all alone in the world. I have neither chick nor child" as she passes year by predictable year in the same Dublin house she was born in. One stormy night, Alice opens her door to Dinah, a spirited black woman whom Alice becomes convinced is the black baby she "adopted" from the missionaries of Africa when she was a child. This new-found daughter breathes warmth and energy into Alice's barren existence, and a friendship ensues that becomes the beloved focus of a lonely woman's life. Clare Boylan has written a moving novel that is punctuated with laugh-out-loud scenes of absurdity reminiscent of fellow Irishman Flann O'Brien: "...it was not Mrs Willoughby's hand which had struck the table, but her head. The vigilant glass eyes of the fox stared up from the bread plate, its dead paws flung out in alarm beside the dead head of its owner." Magical and absorbing, this book is a wonder to read. --Shannon Bingham
The Agony and the Ego: Art and Strategy of Fiction Writing Explored

Clare Boylan
Emma Brown

Clare Boylan

Clare Boylan's expansion of Bronte's scrap of plot into Emma Brown is powerfully imagined and stylish, with enough melodramatic twists to keep the momentum going until the end. She is distinctly successful in recreating faithfully an idiom both familiar yet obsolete. Charlotte Bronte left a fragment of a novel at her death, subsequently published under the title Emma, concerning the placement by a rich father of a haughty and unresponsive daughter at a school for young ladies. As with Jane Austen's Sanditon or Dickens' Edwin Drood it has offered later writers the challenge of guessing a dead author's intentions.
Paradoxically, one of the opportunities that such an enterprise offers is the possibility of subverting the apparent direction of a plot-line, or undermining the perceived character of participants in the story and Clare Boylan takes extensive--perhaps too extensive--advantage of her freedom in this regard. A modern author's preoccupations are unlikely to be the same as those of a mid-Victorian and Boylan's story takes Charlotte Bronte's characters into darker milieu, and with a greater explicitness of social detail, than their creator is likely to have permitted herself. Rather like Charles Palliser did with Dickens in The Quincunx, Boylan seems to be trying to strip away the euphemism and restraint required of the great 19th-century novelists to show the reality of the world they mirrored. Students of Victorian social history will recognise elements drawn from Mayhew and WT Stead, among others: indeed Stead and the incident for which he is now best remembered--the purchase of a child--has clearly influenced a key character and plot element.
There is much of Dickens, and perhaps even more of Wilkie Collins, in the plotting, which survives a tendency to the schematic or mechanical to deliver a story that ranges widely through 19th-century England and society. This is a remarkable achievement in many ways. While clearly not the novel that Charlotte Bronte would have written, it is a successful resuscitation of the forms of high Victorian fiction as a vessel for 21st-century concerns. --Robin Davidson
Beloved Stranger

Clare Boylan
Holy Pictures

Clare Boylan
The Literary Companion to Cats
Room for a Single Lady

Clare Boylan
Emma Brown

Clare Boylan

Clare Boylan's expansion of Bronte's scrap of plot into Emma Brown is powerfully imagined and stylish, with enough melodramatic twists to keep the momentum going until the end. She is distinctly successful in recreating faithfully an idiom both familiar yet obsolete. Charlotte Bronte left a fragment of a novel at her death, subsequently published under the title Emma, concerning the placement by a rich father of a haughty and unresponsive daughter at a school for young ladies. As with Jane Austen's Sanditon or Dickens' Edwin Drood it has offered later writers the challenge of guessing a dead author's intentions.
Paradoxically, one of the opportunities that such an enterprise offers is the possibility of subverting the apparent direction of a plot-line, or undermining the perceived character of participants in the story and Clare Boylan takes extensive--perhaps too extensive--advantage of her freedom in this regard. A modern author's preoccupations are unlikely to be the same as those of a mid-Victorian and Boylan's story takes Charlotte Bronte's characters into darker milieu, and with a greater explicitness of social detail, than their creator is likely to have permitted herself. Rather like Charles Palliser did with Dickens in The Quincunx, Boylan seems to be trying to strip away the euphemism and restraint required of the great 19th-century novelists to show the reality of the world they mirrored. Students of Victorian social history will recognise elements drawn from Mayhew and WT Stead, among others: indeed Stead and the incident for which he is now best remembered--the purchase of a child--has clearly influenced a key character and plot element.
There is much of Dickens, and perhaps even more of Wilkie Collins, in the plotting, which survives a tendency to the schematic or mechanical to deliver a story that ranges widely through 19th-century England and society. This is a remarkable achievement in many ways. While clearly not the novel that Charlotte Bronte would have written, it is a successful resuscitation of the forms of high Victorian fiction as a vessel for 21st-century concerns. --Robin Davidson
Another Family Christmas: A Collection of Short Stories

Clare Boylan
That Bad Woman

Clare Boylan
The Collected Short Stories

Clare Boylan
Last Resorts

Clare Boylan
Home Rule

Clare Boylan
A Nail on the Head

Clare Boylan
Beloved Stranger

Clare Boylan
Holy Pictures

Clare Boylan
Home Rule

Clare Boylan
Concerning Virgins

Clare Boylan
Holy Pictures - A Novel.

Clare: Boylan
Home Rule

Clare Boylan