The Wren, the Wren

Born in Dublin in 1962, Irish novelist Anne Enright studied creative writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. Enright cites Carter as a particularly strong influence on her writing, which is evident in their shared focus on the uncanny experience of the female body. Where Carter’s work functioned as a platform for feminism and subversion in the 1960s and ’70s, Enright used her writing to examine the relationship between the body and identity. One of Enright’s early novels, What Are You Like? (2000), follows twin girls who are separated at birth and raised in England and Ireland, respectively. This premise not only hints at the way family dynamics have a profound effect on one’s characters but also points to the continuing cultural tensions between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Enright’s fascination with family dynamics continues in her later work, most prominently her 2007 novel, The Gathering, which won that year’s Man Booker Prize. The novel is told from the perspective of a woman whose brother has died by suicide. In his lifetime, the brother experienced alcohol addiction, which hints at the difficult family truths the woman and her seven surviving siblings uncover throughout the narrative. The Gathering thus allowed Enright to explore the social and behavioral patterns of Irish families and how the country’s relationship with the Catholic Church influenced these behaviors.

In her work, Enright has also explored the notions of fame and the divide this creates between one’s public and private life. Her third novel, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002), is a fictionalized story about the Irish mistress of Francisco Solano López, who was the president of Paraguay in the late 19th century. Similarly, her seventh novel, Actress (2020), follows the life of Katherine O’Dell, an Irish actress who comes to prominence in the country’s theater scene before moving up to Broadway and then Hollywood at the end of the 20th century. The titular actress is considered from the perspective of her daughter, who not only reveals her mother’s secrets but also unpacks the effect that her mother’s fame had on her upbringing. This ties fame to family life as well, continuing Enright’s focus on the family’s impact on individual identity.

The themes of family dynamics and fame appear prominently in Enright’s eighth novel, The Wren, The Wren, which examines how fame and trauma stretch across three generations of an Irish family. Though he doesn’t quite achieve the level of fame as Actress’s Katherine O’Dell, the text introduces Phil McDaragh as one of the great Irish poets of his time. On different occasions, his daughter, Carmel, and his granddaughter, Nell, are identified by their relationship with him, which points to their existence in his shadow. Much of Carmel’s storyline involves her reckoning with the consequences of Phil’s abusiveness as a parent, which is obscured from the official history that is written in his public life. Nell’s story, on the other hand, exposes the ways Carmel’s resistance to Phil accidentally replicates the circumstances that lead to abuse. Nell ironically turns to Phil’s poetry whenever she looks for someone in her family to understand her, though she later comes to terms with the ways her need to invent their relationship relies on fantasies that fail to match the real man.