Valerie Martin (born 1948, Missouri) is an American novelist and short story writer. She has also taught at Mount Holyoke College, Loyola University New Orleans, The University of New Orleans, The University of Alabama, and Sarah Lawrence College, among other institutions. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has one child, Adrienne, born in 1975. Her novel Property (2003) won the prestigious Orange Prize. Her other fictional works include Set in Motion (1978), Alexandra (1979), A Recent Martyr (1987), The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories (1988), The Great Divorce (1993), Italian Fever (1999), The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories (2006), and Trespass (2007), as well as Salvation: Scenes from the Life of St. Francis (2001), a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. Her most recent novel, The Confessions of Edward Day, was published in August 2009.
Her 1990 novel, Mary Reilly, a retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from the point of view of a servant in the doctor's house, was released in 1996 as the Columbia TriStar Pictures film, Mary Reilly. It is directed by Stephen Frears and stars John Malkovich as Dr. Jekyll and Julia Roberts as Mary.
The short subject film Surface Calm (2001) is based on her short story of the same title from her first book, Love (1977).
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