Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Contributors Chronology of Maggie O’Farrell’s Life and Works Introduction - Elaine Canning (Swansea University, UK) In Search of Maggie O’Farrell 1. ‘The Space Between’: Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (Susan Alice Fischer, Medgar Evers College/CUNY, USA) 2. Love, Loss and (Be)longing in After You’d Gone and The Distance Between Us (Elaine Canning, Swansea University, UK) 3. ‘The Women We Become After Children’: Palimpsests of the City and the Self in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Hand That First Held Mine (Ruth Gilligan, University of Birmingham, UK) 4. Vantage Points: How Maggie O’Farrell Dissects a Marriage by Shifting Points of View in This Must Be the Place (Edward Matthews, San Diego, USA) 5. Lost in Translation: The Dis-Located Structures of Maggie O’Farrell’s My Lover’s Lover (Sarah Gamble, Swansea University, UK) 6. ‘A small victory for Love over Death’: the haunted narratives of I Am, I Am, I Am, Instructions for a Heatwave, and The Hand that First Held Mine (Tasha Alden, Aberystwyth University, UK) 7. The taming shrew: Agnes in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet as (early) modern husbander (Nicholas Taylor-Collins, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK) 8. Filling Historical and Emotional Voids: Hamnet (Laurie Maguire, University of Oxford, UK) 9. Remaking the Duchess: Underpainting and Overpainting in The Marriage Portrait (Elaine Canning, Swansea University, UK) 10. ‘Post-It Baby’: An Interview with Maggie O’Farrell (Elaine Canning, Swansea University, UK) Bibliography Further Reading Index

Promotional Information

This is the first full-length companion to reading and studying Maggie O’Farrell, featuring new critical essays and textual readings of her work and includes an exclusive interview O'Farrell herself.

About the Author

Elaine Canning is a writer, editor and public engagement specialist living in Swansea, South Wales, UK. Originally from Belfast, she holds an MA and PhD in Hispanic Studies from Queen's University, Belfast, and an MA in Creative Writing from Swansea University. She is currently Head of Special Projects at Swansea University, which include the Rhys Davies National Short Story Competition and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She has authored a monograph and papers on Spanish Golden-Age drama and her short stories have appeared in Nation.Cymru and The Lonely Crowd. Editor of Take a Bite: The Rhys Davies Short Story Award Anthology (2021), New World, New Beginnings: Resilience and Connectivity through Poetry (2021), and Cree: The Rhys Davies Short Story Award Anthology (2022), she is also the author of a debut novel, The Sandstone City (2022) and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Reviews

Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet brought her the critical acclaim she has long deserved, and now this excellent collection of essays brings her the scholarly attention she merits. These essays are theoretically savvy and offer smart but accessible readings that will return readers and scholars to the delights of O’Farrell’s work.
*Jo Eldridge Carney, Professor of English, The College of New Jersey, USA*