Nora Webster was published by Viking in 2014. The novel is transparently based on Toibin’s own family — his father died when Colm was twelve, and his mother had to rebuild her life in a small Wexford town where everyone knew her business and had opinions about her choices.
Nora’s husband Maurice, a teacher, has died. She is left with four children, a house she can barely afford, and a community that treats widowhood as a permanent state. The novel follows her over roughly two years as she makes a series of small decisions that collectively amount to a revolution: she returns to work (at a local grain store, then at the Inland Revenue); she sells the family’s holiday house despite her children’s objections; she joins a choral group and discovers a passion for singing.
None of these actions is dramatic. That is the point. Toibin writes about the accumulation of tiny assertions of self — each one met by the community’s gentle but persistent pressure to remain the widow, the mother, the woman defined by her loss. The novel’s emotional climax is not a confrontation but a moment of private satisfaction: Nora singing, alone in her house, because she wants to.
Collecting Nora Webster
First edition (Viking, London, 2014): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $15–$30
- Signed first: $30–$60