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Girls in Their Married Bliss

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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.