This event is being hosted by Cathy of 746 Books, who is known for celebrating all things literary and Irish. Moore’s Irish connections are always jarring to me, as he’s well known as a Canadian author here. In reality, he was a wanderer, living in many places in Europe and North America, and spent more time in the United States than anywhere. So I guess it’s not that odd that I read a “New Canadian Library” edition of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, a book about Ireland, with an afterword by Australian writer Janette Turner Hospital. Actually, Hospital lived in Ontario for thirty years, later moving to the States, sharing a claim on Canadian identity and a nomadic spirit with Moore.

Hospital uses that connection, and familiarity with being “from away”, to bring forth themes of displacement in her brief afterword to this edition. Miss Hearne lives a very circumscribed life in Belfast, but Hospital shows us that she actually goes on an epic journey, including romance, hope, dashed expectations, and a crisis of faith. The afterword was illuminating, but to me the more interesting themes were those of hunger, desire, and rage – or, you know, passion – and specifically the rage of the middle aged woman. These themes reminded me of Jean Rhys’s writing, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that the same editor who shepherded Wide Sargasso Sea into the world, Diana Athill, was a champion of this book.

Miss Hearne’s dreary bedsit put me in mind of Good Morning, Midnight‘s heroine Sasha’s awful hotel rooms. Both characters are without family, of little means, near starving, drink to excess and fall prey to depraved men. If anything, Sasha had less hope than Miss Hearne, lacking an object for her anger (other than herself), with no church to storm and no one to ask for forgiveness. Sasha had only lately fallen on hard times, while Miss Hearne had been sidelined her whole life, first by her tyrannical Aunt, and then by poverty. In The Lonely Passion, we see a woman who has been made invisible her whole life finally demand to be seen.

We don’t know exactly how old Miss Hearne is, though a minor character thinks she “will never see the fair side of forty again” and Sasha is similarly, vaguely “middle aged”. The invisibility of women once they enter middle age has been a hot topic for a while, but lest you think this is anything new, I am currently reading a book published in 1778 in which a man declares, “I don’t know what the devil a woman lives for after thirty: she is only in other folk’s way.” (Evelina by Frances Burney).

So while Miss Hearne, and Sasha, are definitely displaced and without a home, like their authors, I think Moore’s choice of a female protagonist is significant, and not just as a “mask” for autobiography, as Hospital speculates. I want to be careful about reading any feminist intent into this book, though. Moore’s novel of first contact between Jesuits and Indigenous people in 1600s Canada, Black Robe, was (still is?) celebrated here, taught in schools and everything, despite criticism of its colonial perspective and outright racism (remember when The Orenda was though to be the non-problematic successor to Black Robe? Oy!) so putting this book on a feminist pedestal doesn’t seem like a good idea. But as a woman who will never see the fair side of forty again herself, this book is at once frightening and triumphant. As Hospital says, Moore shows us “the immeasurable importance and the fearful insignificance of an individual life”.

Read Cathy’s review here, and Bookish Beck’s here.