Women often have a difficult relationship with their mothers. Writers are no different. I've been thinking about the very different mother-daughter relationships of Elizabeth Hardwick and Edna O'Brien, the subjects of my previous biography and the one that will be published this year.
Hardwick's mother was an upbeat, pragmatic, hardworking woman who cared for her large family in a small house in Lexington, Kentucky. She responded to her husband's tall tales and indolent disposition with occasional outbursts that were simply absorbed into everyday life. Her education had stopped early, creating a huge gulf with her brainy, restless daugher who believed she was destined for greater things. Elizabeth left for New York to enter a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, eventually dropping out to pursue her writing.
During her twenties, when she came home for holidays and summer vacations, her mother was a thorn in her side. Even the decision of what to buy her for Christmas one year became a pitched battle that Elizabeth "had to win." But the mother-daughter relationship faded into the background after Elizabeth's marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, whose self-entitled mother proved far more difficult to deal with. Elizabeth's mature fiction, set mainly in New York, does not feature characters who appear to be based on her mother.
Edna's mother, Helena, also had only a basic education. She was a deeply religious Catholic who harbored a great hatred of books and writing as instruments of evil. Helena was very close to this daughter, her youngest child. In Edna's youth in County Clare, Ireland, the two spent nearly all their time together, sleeping in the same bed and uniting to ward off the worst of her father's drunken rages. This closeness left a legacy of guilt. Living in London, where she threw parties mobbed by drinking, pot-smoking friends and hangers on, and had serial affairs with married men, Edna knew her mother would be grief-stricken with disapproval.
Helena wrote a constant stream of letters with unchanging themes: she missed Edna terribly and she hoped Edna was being "good." It was not until after her mother's death in 1977 that Edna discovered a copy of first novel, The Country Girls, hidden away near the family house, with black marks obliterating passages Helena found repellent; she had even crossed out Edna's dedication to her.
Unlike Elizabeth Hardwick, Edna remained haunted by her mother. A mishap—a glass breaking in Edna's hand after someone at a party said that Helena wouldn't like to see her daughter drinking—struck her as a major portent. It can't be coincidental that the mother of Caithleen in Edna's first novel, The Country Girls (1960) is conveniently dead. Helena's alter ego makes an early appearance in a radio play, Which of These Two Ladies Is He Married To? produced by the BBC in 1967. A mother brings two freshly killed chickens on a visit to her daughter in London and is scandalized by the attitudes of the friends she has invited to her dinner party. Edna's short story "Green Georgette," first published in 1978, also has a character clearly modeled on Helena.
After her death, Edna's own experience of motherhood—she had two sons—began to inform her writing, especially in the character of Nell in Time and Tide (1992). Yet she once described Nell as "conscious of her mother, in all the actions of her life"—an apt description of her own experience. Edna was seventy-five when The Light of Evening was published in 2006, in which a dying farmer's wife muses on events in her past and on her wayward novelist daughter. The novel is steeped with Helena's influence; it contains quotations from her letters as well as imagined scenes from her life as a young woman working in Brooklyn.
© Cathy Curtis 2025