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Life
1954- ; teacher at Greendale Community School, with Roddy Doyle; winner of Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer School Poetry Prize, 1990; issued In the Beginning (1997); A Name for Himself (1998), dealing with a man who marries out of his class; The Walled Garden (2000); Another Kind of Life (2003), deals alternately with the contrasting lives of Eleanor and Hannah, upper-class girls in Dublin and those of Mary and Cecilia, poor orphans in Belfast; also An Unconsidered People (2003), reflecting on the Irish in London as a forgotten people, and Another Kind of Life (Picador).
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Works
Fiction, In the Beginning (Jonathan Cape 1997; pb. 1998), 288pp.; A Name for Himself (London: Jonathan Cape 1998), 288pp.; The Walled Garden (London: Macmillan 2000), 309pp.; Another Kind of Life (London: Picador 2003), 492pp.; Something Like Love (London: Macmillan 2006), 310pp.
Miscellaneous, An Unconsidered People (Dublin: New Island Press 2003), 243pp., ill.
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Criticism
Interview, Books Ireland (March 1997), p.49; John Dunne, review [In the Beginning], in Books Ireland (May 1997), p.123; See also contrib. to Caitriona Moloney & Helen Thompson, eds., Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices from the Field, with a foreword by Ann Owen Weekes (Syracuse UP 2003), q.pp.
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Commentary
Anne Fogarty, reviewing The Walled Garden (Macmillan), writes of a novel in which daughter returns to bedside of comatose mother in search of reconciliation and self-knowledge; ‘successive chapters interweave their different histories and subtly expose their psychic interdependence as well as their long-standing rivalries […] without resort to sensation’’; ‘Although set in a contemporary Dublin suburb [it] is curiously placeless and timeless’; ‘movingly renders the complex, guilt-ridden and troubled bonds between mother and daughters. Unusually, too, for an Irish novel, it depicts the family not as a source of tragedy but as the ground for inner renewal.’ (Irish Times, 8 July 2000.)
John Kenny, reviewing Catherine Dunne, Another Kind of Life (Picador), in The Irish Times (15 Feb. 2003), Weekend, p.11, speaks of current predeliction for writing virtual history, and cites Emma Donoghue, Anne Haverty, Mary Morrissey, and Anne Enright.
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