Mary Flanagan Biography

novelist and short-story writer, born in Rochester, New Hampshire, educated at Brandeis University. She moved to Britain in 1969, and the expatriate perspective she employs in some of her work has earned her the inevitable comparisons with Henry James and Wharton. Flanagan is, however, a resolutely contemporary writer, as her debut collection of stories, Bad Girls (1984), proved. She has been praised for her skill with the shorter form, in which she displays subtlety, irony, neat plotting, and stylistic economy. Her novels Trust (1987), a study of the relationships of two women and two men, and the modern Bildungsroman Rose Reason (1990) are, by contrast, large in scope and sprawling in structure, ranging over two continents and long timespans. With the whimsical, sometimes surrealistic short fictions collected in The Blue Woman (1994), Flanagan successfully returned to the form in which she made her name.