The first story the New Review ever published is also one of the best they ever published. Its title refers to Eily Hogan, the most beautiful girl in the village for whom the story’s younger, female narrator will do almost anything. This includes helping Eily conduct her assignations with a bank clerk, but doesn’t extend to admitting her own role in the affair when Eily gets pregnant and is forced into marrying the man. The resulting rupture in their friendship is heartbreaking, and the unhappiness into which Eily sinks in her loveless marriage a savage indictment of Catholic Ireland. “Ours indeed was a land of shame, and a land of murder, and a land of strange sacrificial women,” the story ends despairingly.
First published in the New Review, April 1974. Collected in A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974
A Personal Anthology 