Women left behind | Review of Anne Enright’s novel ‘The Wren, The Wren’, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024

Anne Enright's novel, The Wren, The Wren, explores love, abandonment, and generational trauma, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024.

Irish writer Anne Enright’s eighth novel The Wren, The Wren is a tale of love and the suffering of those abandoned by a loved one, and the emotional rubble that multiple generations have to live with. The book has been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024.

Told through the alternating narratives of Carmel and Nell, this is the story of three generations of women who live in the shadow of a man who abandoned them. Famous poet Phil McDaragh leaves his wife Terry when she falls ill from cancer. Their daughters, Carmel and Imelda, are left to care for their mother alone. Years later, Carmel decides that she does not need a man’s involvement in her life and raises her daughter, Nell, by herself. “When Carmel had her baby, many years later, she did not give it to any man. That would be like holding it out at an arm’s length and dropping it right there, on the concrete... Because this baby was hers, and hers alone.”

Nell is the kind of young woman you may find in a Sally Rooney book. She experiments with her career and her writing, and finds comfort in her grandfather’s poetry. In a very Rooney fashion, Nell says, “What I wanted more than anything was uninterrupted crying time. I had a screaming need to be alone. I did not say this to Lily, I told her I needed to write a book. Which, when you think about it, is probably code for the same thing.”

Through Nell’s character, Enright, whose fourth novel The Gathering won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, gives us a glimpse into modern relationships and the casual normalisation of sexual aggression among young males. Nell, after distancing herself from Carmel, is in a relationship that is harming her but thinks she can fix the problem by talking to the man who creates the problem. She cannot talk to her mother about this because Carmel would never understand, she never had a great romance.

Enright writes about growing up in Ireland, about old age and young love. Through Nell, she writes about sex that is bad for women, and only for the pleasure of men. There are also little acts of aggression in the book — the physical pain Imelda inflicts on her younger sister, Carmel; the violent fight between the two over the division of assets after their mother’s death. “It was a year where the sisters did not speak except through the costly and forbearing Mr. Ledwidge who said later he had never seen anything like it, and he has seen them all,” writes Enright about the fissures the mother’s death creates in the sisters’ relationship with each other.

The world admires Phil McDaragh for his poetry. Scholars and readers romanticise the relationships he has had with women. They adore his ability to see beauty in Ireland’s nature and her creatures while on the other hand, Phil fails to see the beauty inside his home — of three women who love him and need him. “Later again he would say — as though he could not hear his own words — that his wife got sick and his marriage did not survive. He said this as though everyone listening would know that, when a woman gets sick, the marriage deteriorates, clearly, the relationship cannot be sustained.”

The Wren, The Wren is a portrait of pompous poets and their misogyny. At the same time, it focuses on marriage, motherhood, and the emotional life of women.