Annie Dunne
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Amazon.co.uk Review
The central character in Sebastian Barry's novel Annie Dunne is a woman who has been pushed to the margins, a woman whom life has given few chances of happiness and fulfilment. Unmarried, she spends years as housekeeper to her brother-in-law because her sister is too ill to manage. Her sister dies, her brother-in-law remarries and Annie Dunne is homeless. Invited by her cousin Sarah, she moves to a small farm in a remote part of Wicklow. As the novel opens, the two cousins share their lives and the work on the farm. It is the late 1950s and rural Ireland is changing around them. Annie's nephew heads for London in search of work and leaves his young children with their great-aunt. Content with her life with Sarah, Annie also finds a new capacity for love in her feelings for the two children. Yet even the small pleasures that Annie finds in her life are threatened. An unlikely suitor pays court to Sarah. Her love for the children opens her up to pain almost as much as to happiness. Annie Dunne is a novel in which few external dramas occur--there is an accident with a pony and trap, one of the children goes temporarily missing--but Barry evokes superbly the inner dramas of his characters. In a society where emotions are often severely repressed and expressed only obliquely, small incidents hint at larger feelings and Barry has written a story in which these are subtly and poignantly unfolded.--Nick Rennison
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Unsentimental and exact, like clear glass.' The Times
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
62 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Moments of Beauty,
By P. A. Hogan (Providence RI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Annie Dunne (Paperback)
It is the summer of 1960 at Kelsha in rural Wicklow where Annie Dunne, an impoverished and proud spinster who has known better times, lives out her days on a farm owned by her cousin Sarah. Annie’s nephew and his wife leave their young son and daughter in the care of elderly Annie and Sarah while they are in London preparing for their family’s eventual relocation there. Concurrently, Annie’s already shaky sense of security is threatened, testing her mettle to its limits.There are moments of beauty in this story, bolstered by the fulsomeness of Barry’s writing. Barry justifies his prose: “If you listen carefully for how people are talking to you in Ireland, in certain districts, it is quite elaborate, there is a strangeness to it.” An interesting aside is that Annie Dunne was a real person: the author’s father’s aunt and, in his boyhood, his “favorite person on God’s earth.” And, like the boy in the story, Barry lived with her at Kelsha one summer in his youth.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Annie Dunne : A woman of no importance?,
By
This review is from: Annie Dunne (Paperback)
It's 1959 and Annie Dunne is as old as the century. She belongs to that group of never-married women, common amongst her generation, who survived by being useful to others; often more loving than loved. With her father long dead and her brother-in-law no longer needing her to look after his children, Annie has been taken in by her cousin Sarah Cullen where she makes herself useful on Sarah's Wicklow smallholding.The story opens with the arrival of two city children to stay with Annie and Sarah. It's the beginning of summer. The events of this summer will threaten to destroy Annie's fragile physical and emotional existence. This novel is as finely embroidered as the country scene on Sarah Cullen's coverlet and Barry's masterful portrayal of rural life begs comparison with Hardy. His real triumph, however, is in giving a voice to Annie Dunne and showing that this much put-upon creature is a woman capable of being valued, and loved, for herself rather than her utility.
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timeless and lyrical,
By Cromarty Forth Tyne (Edinburgh) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Annie Dunne (Paperback)
What stands out from the first page of reading this is the quality of the writing. Lyrical and moving without being overly sentimental, Barry let's the reader become immersed in the life of Annie Dunne, experiencing the hardships and the brief moments of joy with the same rhthym as you imagine her life on the farm being, languid and prosaic. Although it's set in the 1950s you never get any real indication of that time so that it's almost as if time is standing still and only now and again do you get a sense that things are moving on in the "outside world" and that Annie's way of life will become a distant memory but one that still lingers in the shadows and unkept fields of rural Ireland. Great stuff.
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