The Light of Evening was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2006, when O’Brien was seventy-five and still writing with the emotional intensity that had characterized her work from the beginning. The novel tells two stories in alternating chapters: Dilly’s, beginning in rural Ireland in the early 1900s, and her daughter Eleanora’s, set in London in the present tense of the novel. Together they span a century of Irish women’s experience.
Dilly’s story is the more powerful and, O’Brien has acknowledged, the more autobiographical. Born into rural poverty, married to a man she does not love, raising children in the shadow of the Church and the farm, Dilly endures with a combination of resilience and suppressed fury that O’Brien captures in prose of devastating simplicity. The descriptions of rural life — the work, the weather, the animals, the small humiliations and consolations of a life lived within a mile of where it began — rank with O’Brien’s finest writing.
Eleanora’s story is a more self-conscious creation — the daughter who escapes, writes novels about her mother’s world (novels that sound very like O’Brien’s), and lives with the guilt of having turned private pain into public art. The relationship between mother and daughter is the novel’s emotional core: Dilly is proud of her daughter’s success and resentful of the exposure it brings; Eleanora loves her mother and cannot stop writing about her. The impossibility of resolving this tension — of being both a loyal daughter and an honest writer — is the book’s real subject.
The novel was well received, with critics noting that O’Brien’s late style — more spacious, more forgiving, less angry than her early work — gave the material a depth and resonance that the Country Girls novels, for all their power, could not achieve. The light of evening is the light of retrospect: gentler, warmer, but also more melancholy than the harsh daylight of youth.
Collecting The Light of Evening
First edition (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2006): Cloth, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- American first (Houghton Mifflin): $8–$20
- Later editions: $5–$10