Girls in Their Married Bliss was published by Jonathan Cape in 1964, completing the trilogy that had begun with The Country Girls four years earlier. The tone is dramatically different: where the first novel was lyrical and the second melancholy, this one is bitter, comic, and despairing. For the first time, O’Brien gives Baba Brennan a narrative voice alongside Kate’s, and Baba’s voice — sharp, vulgar, funny, utterly unsentimental — cuts through the romantic fog that had surrounded Kate’s story.
Both women are now in London, married and miserable. Kate’s marriage to Eugene Gaillard has deteriorated into a prison: he controls her movements, her friendships, and her access to their son. Baba has married a wealthy builder — “a big thick ignorant man,” as she cheerfully describes him — for his money, and finds herself trapped in a different kind of cage, padded with comfort but no less confining. The novel follows both women as their marriages collapse, with consequences that are more violent and irrevocable than anything in the earlier books.
O’Brien’s great achievement in this novel is the double voice. Kate and Baba represent two responses to the same oppressive world: Kate internalizes its cruelty, becoming depressed, passive, and self-destructive; Baba externalizes it, becoming aggressive, profane, and survivalist. Neither response is adequate — Kate suffers too much, Baba feels too little — but together they constitute a complete portrait of what it meant to be an Irish woman in the 1960s, caught between a Catholic upbringing that demanded submission and a modern world that offered freedom without the emotional equipment to use it.
The 1986 omnibus edition of the trilogy added an epilogue in which Baba narrates Kate’s subsequent fate — a revelation that is devastating precisely because it is delivered in Baba’s offhand, defensive voice. The epilogue confirmed what the trilogy had implied: that the story of the country girls was not a comedy of escape but a tragedy of damage.
Collecting Girls in Their Married Bliss
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1964): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $40–$120
- Without jacket: $15–$30
- Later editions: $5–$10