Norah Hoult

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Norah Hoult, novelist, was born in Dublin on September 10, 1898. Her parents both died when she was a child. Her mother, Margaret O'Shaughnessy, was a spirited Irish-Catholic girl who eloped (at the age of 21) with a Protestant English architect named Powis Hoult. After Norah and her brother were orphaned they were sent to live with their father's relations in England, where they were educated in various boarding schools.

She married the writer, Oliver Stonor, and lived with him at The Cottage in Windsor Great Park for a year, but returned to Ireland to collect material for her writing from 1931 to 1937. The marriage was dissolved in 1934.

Her first book, Poor Women!, appeared in 1928. This collection of short stories received considerable critical acclaim, and has been reprinted several times, both individually and in selected editions. After 1928, Hoult published a formidable list of titles, but only two books, Holy Ireland (1935) and its sequel Coming from the Fair, (1937), are concerned with Irish life. They depict Irish family life from the end of the nineteenth century up to 1916 and particularly explore religious prejudice. In Time Gentlemen! Time! (1930), we see the horror of marriage to an alcoholic and the grimness of middle-class poverty. Here the drab realism is probably accurate enough but grows depressingly soporific in its accumulation. Only Fools and Horses Work, a later novel, is a more cheerful study of widowhood. In 1939 she settled in London, living in Bayswater, not far from Violet Hunt upon whom Claire Temple in There Were No Windows (1944) is modelled.

Between 1928 and 1972 she published twenty-five books; in 1957 she returned to live in Ireland, and died at Jonquil Cottage, Greystones, County Wicklow, on April 6, 1984.