Edna O’Brien (2006) The Light of Evening.

Edna O’Brien’s The Light of Evening follows a familiar mother-daughter path. Dilly is dying in a Dublin hospital. Her daughter, Elenaora, has inherited her beautiful hair, which features in every novel. A writer whose debut novel scandalized her Irish neighbours, and an ultra-Catholic nation because it showed women’s desire from the inside. She has fled to London and married an older man (who already had a wife and child). Her dad is a brute that drunk away their farm and their fortune. Only the dim-witted help, whom Eleanora once pledged to marry kept the farm going on a day-to-day basis. If this doesn’t sound familiar then you’ve not read any of O’Brien’s other books.  

Dilly’s journey to Brooklyn in the 1920s adds weight. It clearly shows how immigrant labour was exploited. Dilly’s true love Gabriel is lost but carried with her, a reminder of what had been and could have been. In poverty, sick and alone, she returns to rural Ireland and marries Cornelius.

He seems a gentleman, but is, of course, an alcoholic wife beater who held a gun to her head.

The nuns at the hospital listen to her stories of hope and reconciliation, not with her husband whom she never loved, but with her daughter. In a final act of defiance, she wants to change her will and leave the farm not to her son, who bullies her, but to her daughter. Dilly chafes at the life she has lived. And the live her daughter lived. Both want reconciliation. I’m pretty sure we’ve heard all this before.  Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6