First published in 1996, Mother of Pearl is Morrissy’s debut novel, and it’s an impressive and moving first work from an Irish writer who’s probably better known for her short stories.
Mother of Pearl is based on the notorious Elizabeth Browne case from the 50s where a young girl was kidnapped in Dubin and brought to Belfast where a woman passed her off as her own child. Morrissy takes that true story as the inspirations for a tale of fractured families, stolen lives, and the kind of secrets that fester and infect any chance at happiness.
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Divided into three main sections, Mother of Pearl explores the internal lives of three Irishwomen linked by the theft of a baby. The story opens with Irene Rivers, a young woman battling tuberculosis, whose has been sent by her family to a sanitorium, as much to have her treated as to hide their shame that she has become sick. Her incarceration in the sanatorium for several years sparks a chain of events that ripple through the decades. Through her time at the hospital, Irene meets Stanley and, on her release, they marry, but when Irene realises, they will never have a baby of their own, she walks into a maternity ward and steals a baby girl, whom she names Pearl and raises as her own.
The baby in question is the daughter of Rita Golden, a young woman who has found herself married and pregnant when just out of school and not even sure she even wants a child until the child is taken from her. Rita is paralysed with guilt, both for losing her child and for her ambivalence before the child was born.
Pearl is the child caught in the crosshairs of their tangled desires, a daughter of two mothers living a life mired in secrets and plagued by memories of people and places for which she has no reference and cannot place.
I would wake from the dream of that life and find little seams in the air as if the skin of a new world had been peeled back and then hurriedly sewn up again, leaving behind only the transparent incisions.
It’s a narrative told through shifting perspectives—Irene’s desperate yearning, Rita’s raw vulnerability, and Pearl’s bewildered innocence—and Morrissy weaves them together with a deft, almost surgical precision.
What struck me most is how Morrissy captures the texture of mid-century Ireland — not the postcard version with rolling green hills, but the gritty, claustrophobic reality of a society bound by shame and silence. The sanatorium looms like a shadow darkening Irene’s future, all cold corridors and whispered judgments, while the outside world feels just as suffocating. There’s a poetic heft to her prose that’s both beautiful and brutal capturing the good intentions that lie beneath an improbable act.
She heard the slap of the swing doors to the ward. She peered out again. On the threshold she found an easeful lull she recognised, a mid-morning hush… These were sacred moments as if in a silent church aquiver with candlelight. Sacred but short-lived. Irene stepped out on to the corridor and walked with purpose to the stairwell.
Thematically, Mother of Pearl acts as an exploration of what makes a family—blood, choice, or something more elusive. It’s a question that haunts every page, especially as Irene’s act of stealing baby Pearl blurs the lines between love and possession. There’s a tragic absurdity to it all, a blackly comic edge that Morrissy balances with heartbreaking tenderness.
Morrissy has a knack for peeling back the layers of ordinary lives to reveal the raw mess underneath. There’s a touch of Edna O’Brien’s poetic darkness too, that unflinching gaze at human frailty.
Mother of Pearl is driven by desperation, a relentless search, and a flood of questions about the essence of family and the nature of authentic memory. Children—whether lost, taken, rediscovered, or lingering as spectral figures—act as signposts, vital hints scattered across the broken lives Morrissy explores.
Mother of Pearl is a singular book; a hidden gem that never quite got the spotlight it deserved. Maybe it’s the tough subject matter—baby-snatching and sanatoriums aren’t exactly light fare—but this is a powerful, assured novel, which has made me want to read more of Morrissy’s work.
Claire at Word by Word has also reviewed Mother of Pearl and you can read a great piece by Morrissy on her website detailing the bizarre events of the real-life kidnapping which inspired her story.
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