Here in Northern Ireland, where he was born, Brian Friel has a huge and justified reputation as a playwright, but I didn’t even know he started out writing short stories until Penguin issued a selection of them earlier this year. It’s not so surprising, really – the efficiency of setting up narrative in a story and in a play must be connected skills. This is the best story in the new selection; it’s a bit less twinkly-eyed and Frank O’Connor-esque than some of the others, and it concerns the daughter of an Irish household who has moved to Rhodesia (as it then was), and how that affects everyone. It’s set largely in one room – the playwright flexing – and the characters, the details, the gestures, are all perfectly pitched; it’s sad and funny; it made me wish Friel hadn’t given up prose.
First published in the New Yorker, 11 Nov 1961, where it can be read online, and collected in The Saucer of Larks, Victor Gollancz, 1962, and in Stories of Ireland, Penguin, 2025
A Personal Anthology 