Girls in Their Married Bliss [Mass Market Paperback]

Edna O'Brien (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 24, 2003 | Series: The Country Girls Trilogy

Girls in Their Married Bliss continues the tale of Kate and Baba, two ambitious Irish country girls in search of life. Romantic Kate seeks love, while pragmatic Baba will take whatever she can get. Together they set out to conquer Dublin and the world. Under the big city's bright lights, they spin their lives into a whirl of comic and touching misadventures, wild flirtations, and reckless passions. But love changes everything. And as their lives take unexpected and separate turns, Baba and Kate must ultimately learn to go it alone.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Edna O'Brien is the acclaimed author of eighteen novels.

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Plume (June 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452284384
• ISBN-13: 978-0452284388
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 6.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,383,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Edna O'Brien, the author of "The Country Girls" Trilogy, "The Light of Evening," and "Byron in Love," is the recipient of the James Joyce Ulysses Medal, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The novel ends on a weirdly hopeful note, April 16, 2011

By 

Beth Quinn Barnard (Oregon USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Girls in Their Married Bliss (Paperback)

Edna O'Brien's ironically-titled Girls in Their Married Bliss picks up a few years after The Lonely Girls, the second novel in her Country Girls trilogy. Kate and Baba are now both married and living in London, and for the first time Baba narrates a portion of the story in the cynical, wise-cracking voice one would expect from knowing her in the other two novels. Baba has married a loud, vulgar and rich builder named Frank, and Kate has married her older lover, Eugene, and borne him a son.

SPOILER ALERT:

Over the course of the novel, Baba will also bear a daughter from an adulterous coupling, endure occasional beatings from her husband, and wind up his caregiver after he suffers a disabling stroke. Over the course of the novel, Kate will leave Eugene, struggle to create a separate home where she can have her son at least part time, and lose the boy entirely when his father flees to Fiji with the child. Despite the tragedies Baba and Kate suffer, the novel ends on a weirdly hopeful note, with Kate undergoing sterilization after carving out a life for herself that's not 100-percent dependent on a man and Baba surprised to discover that Frank's neediness has allowed her to recognize for the first time the true affection she has for him. Unfortunately, the 1986 edition of the trilogy contains an epilogue that struck me as truly bizarre. Baba is waiting at Waterloo for the arrival of a train bearing Kate's coffin. In the intervening years, Kate regained custody of her son -- now a student at Harvard -- and found success with a bookshop outside London, but following the collapse of another relationship with a married man, she checked into a health spa where she drowned in the pool, an "accident" that Baba presumes is suicide. Why, having made a success of her life, would Kate kill herself over a man when for many, many years when she was most definitely NOT a success she managed to survive the failure of her love affairs without doing herself in. My advice to readers: Read the novels as written in the 1960s and ignore the epilogue written two decades later.