Rewriting Genre in The Country Girls Trilogy

Abstract

On Edna list of her Top Ten books in Women's Review, number eight is Wuthering Heights; she calls the novel an old favourite and one responsible for certain unwise attitudes of mine towards the opposite sex.1 A number of critics have noted the significance of Emily Bronte's novel, arguing for its cen trality to what Amanda Greenwood calls O'Brien's analysis of the compromised nature of female subjectivity.2 Yet, The Country Girls Trilogy owes a largely unexplored debt to the work of another Bront? sister: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.3 A central theme within the Trilogy is the refashioning of the romantic marriage plot found in the Brontes' works. First published as three separate nov els?The Country Girls (i960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Mar ried Bliss (1964)?then republished in 1986 as a trilogy with a new epilogue, the Trilogy's final incarnation critiques the options historically offered to literature's female heroines and authors. For years, critics have debated the novels' literary merit; until recently, most believed that to understand novels, the reader must understand O'Brien, thereby viewing the novels solely as works of autobiography.4 Others, including Grace Eckley, who was the first to write a monograph on O'Brien, fault the author for not being feminist enough; she