THE RISING OF BELLA CASEY

‘A novel that is compelling and beautiful...full of strange resonances for our own time.' Joseph O'Connor ‘In language that manages to be both elegant and unadorned at the same time, Mary Morrissy makes history rhyme with fiction...[she] has fashioned the notes between the ephemeral and the eternal. This is a wonderful book from one of our finest writers.' Colum McCann ‘Mary Morrissy has a genius for lifting characters out of the dim backgrounds of history and brilliantly illuminating them...she creates a moving drama that O'Casey himself would have acknowledged.' John Banville ‘Mary Morrissy has a genius for lifting characters out of the dim backgrounds of history and brilliantly illuminating them...she creates a moving drama that O'Casey himself would have acknowledged.' John Banville Bella is a bright, clever girl who trains as a school teacher, determined to escape the limitations of her genteel impoverishment and become a “mistress of her own life”. However, the manager of her school, the Rev Archibald Leeper, a married clergyman, develops a morbid attachment to her, which is to colour the rest of her life. Her only escape is to seduce a young army corporal, Nicholas Beaver, to hide the fact that her reputation has been ruined by the clergyman. She marries Nicholas and they have five children, and Bella manages to keep from Nicholas how she has duped him into marriage. However, when Nicholas dies at the age of 40 from syphilis, Bella realizes belatedly that she is not the only one who has been keeping sexual secrets. Bella Casey was the sister of the Irish playwright, Sean O'Casey, author of the Dublin trilogy of plays, Shadow of a Gunman, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars, and their fraught relationship is examined in The Rising of Bella Casey. O'Casey also wrote six volumes of autobiography in which Bella appears. Tellingly, though, her brother chose to kill her off prematurely in his autobiography – at least 10 years before her actual demise. Mary Morrissy has published two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender, and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye. She is winner of the prestigious US Lannan Prize and the Hennessy Award for short fiction. Mother of Pearl was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize (pipped at the post by John Lanchester) and The Pretender was nominated for the IMPAC award. Her short stories have been widely published and anthologised in the UK and US, most recently in the Faber Book of Irish Short Stories 2011, edited by Joseph O'Connor. Her story ‘The Scream' won honourable mention in Best American Short Stories 2010, edited by Richard Russo.