Julia O'Faolain Biography

Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in London, the daughter of Sean O'Faolain, educated at University College, Dublin, with further study at the University of Rome and the Sorbonne in Paris. We Might See Sights! and Other Stories (1968) is a multifarious collection set in Ireland and Italy, and varying in tone from the tender and gently humorous to the acid and gruesome. Her first novel, Godded and Codded (1970), is the comic tale of an innocent Irish girl at large in Paris. The stories collected in Man in the Cellar (1974) displayed her characteristic ironic black humour. Women in the Wall (1975), which marked a new departure, is set in and around a convent in sixth-century Gaul, and revolves around a group of characters, some historical, some invented, who struggle against the social mores and mysticism of the time. No Country for Young Men (1980) is set in present-day Ireland, but recalling the Troubles of the 1920s. The Obedient Wife (1982) concerns a conventional young Italian wife who becomes involved with a Catholic priest. The Irish Signorina (1984) is the story of an Irish girl who goes to stay with the Italian Marchesa for whom her mother worked many years before. Not in God's Image (1973) is a documentary history of women in the West written by O'Faolain and her husband, the American historian Lauro Martines. The Judas Cloth (1992) chronicles the transformation of Pius IX from the progressive ‘Angel Pope’ to the loathed reactionary; rich in period detail, the novel recreates the intrigue and factionalism of post-revolutionary papal Rome.