The Irish novelist Mary Rose Callaghan focuses primarily on the relationships women have with their mothers, with their siblings, and with each other, as well as those with men—fathers, brothers, lovers, and husbands. Unlike more explicitly feminist writers, who often analyze such bonds from a polemical ideological perspective, Callaghan has asserted that she is first of all a humanist, then a feminist. The humanist aspect of her work is what critics have found most appealing. She has no axes to grind, although as one of her surrogates, Sally Ann Fitzpatrick, says at the beginning of The Awkward Girl (1990), “Ireland would make a feminist out of a stone.”

Mary Rose Callaghan was born in North Dublin on 23 January 1944 to Michael Anthony and Sheila Sullivan Callaghan. She grew up mainly on a farm near Finglas in the Irish Republic. In the 1950s Finglas was essentially rural, and Callaghan recalls...