Patricia Craig

Life
?1942- ; b. at 551 Donegall Road, W. Belfast; educated Belfast and London; expelled from St. Dominic’s [Convent Grammar School] for allegedly ‘carrying-on’ with local boys while at the St Brigid's College in the Donegal Gaeltacht (Rannfast), in 1959 [retold in Asking for Trouble, 2002]; effectively banned from other schools and completed her education at Assumption College, Ballynahinch; entered Belfast College of Art, 1960; proceeded to London Central School of Arts & Crafts, 1963 (Dip. hons.); taught art at Notre Dame Convent School, Battersby [London]; collaborated with Mary Cadogan on children"s books incl. You’re a Brick Angela!, a success; returned to Northern Ireland, 1999;
 
contrib. an article to The Observer on Virginia Woolf but was not published again for 10 years; issued a book on girl's fiction with Mary Cadogan (Gollancz 1976); ed. Oxford Books of Detective Stories, Penguin Book of British Comic Stories, and anthologies of Northern Ireland writers; returned from London to Co. Antrim, 1999; issued The Ulster Anthology (2002); freelance author and critic, with an interest in girls' books, detective fiction and World War fiction; she is a biographer of Elizabeth Bowen; frequent contributor to many periodicals, including Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books; m. to a Jeffrey Morgan, a Welsh-born painter; lives in Antrim.

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Works
For children
  • with Mary Cadogan, You're a Brick Angela!: The Girls' Story 1839-1985 (1976)
  • [other works with Cadogan
    • on children"s fiction]
Criticism & Commentary
  • Elizabeth Bowen (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1986), 142pp.
  • Intro. Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart (London: Vintage 1998), 318pp.
  • Brian Moore: A Biography (London: Bloomsbury 2002), 320pp.
  • A Twisted Root: Ancestral Entanglements in Ireland (2012)
Memoirs
  • Asking for Trouble: The Story of An Escapade (Belfast: Blackstaff 2007)
  • Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading (2015)
British anthologies
  • Women and Children First: The Fiction of Two World Wars (1978)
  • The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction (1986)
  • The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (1990)
  • The Penguin Book of British Comic Stories (1992)
  • The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories (1994)
  • The Oxford Book of Schooldays (1995)
  • The Oxford Book of Travel Stories (1996)
Irish anthologies
  • ed., The Rattle of The North: An Anthology of Ulster Prose (Belfast: Blackstaff 1992), 456pp. [see contents].
  • ed. The Oxford Book of Ireland (Oxford/NY: OUP 1998; rep. 1999), 514pp.
  • ed. & intro., 12 Irish Ghost Stories (Oxford: OUP 1998), 145pp.
  • ed., The Belfast Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff 1999), 459pp.
Miscellaneous
  • ‘Green Martyrs’, review of Thomas Kinsella, New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, in London Review of Books (25 July 1986), pp.17-18 [see extract]
  • ‘Ireland’, in The Oxford Guide to Contemporary World Literature, ed. John Sturrock (Oxford: OUP 1996), pp.221-37 [available at Google Books - online].
  • ‘History and its Retrieval in Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry: Paulin, Montague and Others’, in Elmer Andrews, ed., Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays (Macmillan 1996), pp.107-23.
  • Obituary of Sir Charles Brett [q.v.].
  • review of Hugo Hamilton, The Sailor in the Wardrobe, in Times Literary Supplement (10 Feb. 2006) [see under Hamilton, q.v.],
  • [numerous reviews, ... &c.]

Reviews in the New York Review of Books, 1981-82:
  • 13 May 1982: ‘Playing to Empty Pockets’, review of An Duanaire: An Irish Anthology 1600-1900: Poems of the Dispossessed presented by Seán Ó Tuama, with verse translations by Thomas Kinsella.
  • 8 Oct. 1981: ‘Innocents’, review of The Temptation of Eileen Hughes by Brian Moore and A Gift Horse and Other Stories by Kate Cruise O'Brien.
  • 14 May 1981: ‘The Power of the Unstated’, review of The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen
  • 19 March 1981: ‘Thin Ice’, review of Other People's Worlds by William Trevor, and The State of Ireland: Seventeen Stories and a Novella by Benedict Kiely.
  • [...].

Bibliographical details
The Rattle of The North: An Anthology of Ulster Prose, ed. Patricia Craig (Belfast: Blackstaff 1992), 456pp. CONTENTS - selections from from A. T. Q. Stewart; Eamonn McCann; James Stevens Curl; Marianne Elliott; T.W. Moody; Patrick Shea; Mary Delany; Samuel Burdy; William Drennan/Mrs McTier; John Gamble; William Carleton; Benedict Kiely; Shan F. Bullock; Amanda McKittrick Ros; Kathlen Fitzpatrick; Robert Lynd; Florence Mary McDowell; John Hewitt; George A Birmingham; Max Wright; Rosemary Harris; Sam Hanna Bell; Robert Lloyd Praeger; Forrest Reid; C. S. Lewis; E. Estyn Evans; Hanna Bell; WF Marshall; Denis Ireland; Seamus Heaney; Robin Bryans; Louis McNeice; Frank Ormsby; Goerge J Watson; Denis Donoghue; Peadar O’Donnell; Michael McLaverty; John O’Connor; Robert Harbinson; Brian Moore; John Morrow; Maurice Leitch; CEB Brett; Michael Longley; Caroline Blackwood; Naomi May; Polly Devlin; Seamus Dean; Robert Johnstone; Tom Paulin [some of the foregoing in several sections].

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Criticism
  • Fred Johnston, ‘Guid as Gold’, review of The Belfast Anthology, in Books Ireland (March 2000), pp.61-62.
  • [Shirley Kelly, interview], ‘Did It Have to happen to Me?’, in Books Ireland (Oct. 2007), pp.209-10.
  • Malachi O’Doherty, review of Asking for Trouble, in The Independent [UK] (8 Jan. 2008) [see infra].
  • Rory Brennan, review of Asking for Trouble, in Books Ireland (Feb. 2008), p.9.

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Commentary

Seamus Deane, ‘War and peace’, review of Brian Moore, in The Guardian (14 Dec. 2002) - calls the biography ‘a crisp and intelligent account of a man and a writer for whom Craig‘s clean and incisive approach seems perfectly appropriate’. (Available at The Guardian - online; quoted in in Wikipedia entry on Craig - online; both accessed 26.06.2023.)

Malachi O’Doherty, review of Asking for Trouble, in Independent [UK] (8 Jan. 2008): ‘[...] A pained and poignant remembrance of illicit teenage fumblings’. [Available at Independent - online].

Adrian Frazier, "Canon Fodder: Anthologies of Contemporary Irish Poetry", in Colby Quarterly (Dec. 1992) - writes: ‘Patricia Craig [...] conceded that Kinsella may have [194] been correct in saying that Northern writers think of themselves as writing for the whole of the country, but still, she asked, was he not going too far in leaving out of The New Oxford Book Hewitt, Muldoon, Simmons, Paulin, Carson, Longley, McGuckian - just to prove there was no concentration of talent in the North?”’ (Citing Craig, ‘Green Martyrs’, review of Thomas Kinsella, New Oxford Book of Irish Verse, in London Review of Books (25 July 1986), pp.17-18; Frazier, op. cit., pp.194-95 [available online].

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