Maggie O'Farrell Biography
Author of 4 Novels Including The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Maggie O'Farrell is widely acknowledged as one of the most talented writers in the UK, having already produced four critically and popularly acclaimed novels.
Biography
Maggie O'Farrell was born in Northern Ireland in 1972, but also lived in Wales and Scotland as a child. Like many other modern writers, she had a wide variety of different jobs before she could finally earn a full-time living from her writing, including waitress, chambermaid, cycle courier, teacher, and arts administrator. She then worked as a journalist, becoming the Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday. She now lives in Edinburgh with her husband, fellow author William Sutcliffe, perhaps best-known for his 1998 novel Are You Experienced?
Debut Novel: After You'd Gone
O'Farrell's first novel was published in 2000, with immediate success both critically and commercially. Its heroine, Alice, returns to her family home Edinburgh, where she sees something that changes her whole life: a few hours later, she steps into the traffic of a busy London street and is taken to hospital where she lies in a coma.
The novel cleverly switches between the present and the past (a narrative technique which O'Farrell returns to in The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox) as Alice slips between different levels of consciousness, sometimes hearing the conversations of her family sitting around her bedside, sometimes remembering the past. We gradually learn the secrets lurking in this family's history that have led to Alice's actions.
After You'd Gone won the 2001 Betty Trask Award, and was selected by Esther Freud as a Guardian Book of the Year.
My Lover's Lover
O'Farrell's next book appeared in 2002, and continues the novelist's interest in examining the secrets of the past. Lily moves in with her lover Marcus, but finds that his flat still harbours signs of his recently departed ex-girlfriend Sinead: her dress, her perfume, a mysterious mark on the wall.
At first intrigued, Lily's curiosity soon turns to obsession: as Marcus refuses to discuss what happened to Sinead, Lily's imagination starts to take over. In the end, Lily ends up doubting herself, her lover, his flatmate....O'Farrell said herself that she wanted this dark novel to show "that what happens to you through choice is just as frightening as what happens to you through chance".
The Distance Between Us (2004)
O'Farrell's third novel uses a complex dual narrative structure, telling the story through two seemingly unconnected characters: Stella, who starts the novel in London, and Jake, whom we meet in a New Year crush in Hong Kong.
Like its predecessors, this is a novel about relationships and the secrets that can lie within them; O'Farrell considers it to be "on similar terrain to After You’d Gone – families and secrets and the things people hide from each other and those moments that can alter your life forever". This accomplished novel deservedly won The Somerset Maugham Award in 2005.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
O'Farrell's most recent novel has been considered by many to be her best to date. Published in 2006, the tale features two central characters: Iris Lockhart, a young woman whose life is about to be turned upside-down, and the eponymous Esme Lennox. Esme is to be released from a psychiatric hospital into the care of Iris, her great-neice, although Iris had previously been unaware of this relation.
Having never heard of Esme before, Esme sets out to unravel the mystery of her life, a story which reaches back into the 1930s, a time when people held unusual and distressing ideas about the conduct of young women and how they should best be dealt with. Esme is a wondrous creation, funny and heartbreaking at the same time, and O'Farrell handles the narrative with great skill as we switch between the 1930s and the present day: the Literary Review proclaimed that "the novel is brilliant in every way".
Read more about Maggie O'Farrell at her website, or check out some other great modern British writers: Ian McEwan, Jane Harris, Sarah Waters and Anne Enright.
