Background on Mary Doyle Curran
Portrait of Mary Doyle Curran.
Mary Doyle Curran was born in 1917 in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She remained there for the entirety of her adolescence, attending the local public schools for her primary and secondary education. After graduating high school, she went to Massachusetts State College (now known as the University of Massachusetts) where she received her undergraduate degree in English, becoming the first person in her family to ever do so. While at school she met George Curran, and a few years later they married. Curran then proceeded to earn her Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa. She graduated in February 1946 and almost immediately began teaching Contemporary Literature at Wellesley College. She later spent time as an English professor at Queens College, CUNY. Toward the end of her career Curran worked at the University of Massachusetts Boston in the Irish Studies department.
Curran's only published novel, The Parish and the Hill, was released in 1948. She began the writing process during one cold and lonely winter at the University of Iowa, and finished it only a few years later. At the time of its publication it was not widely recognized, but the novel is now regarded as an important piece of Irish American literature, and is particularly esteemed in the Holyoke area where the book is set. Curran's novel has been praised for its straightforward telling of the constraints facing first generation Irish-Americans and their descendants. She was a firm believer in the adage "write what you know" and The Parish and the Hill very clearly reflects this belief. In the forward of the 2002 reissue, Caledonia Kearns writes, "the power of this book...lies in the author's sense of drama and the fierceness of her nostalgia." Curran pulls the reader in with her ability to portray everyday life as something extraordinary, though not always beautiful.
In 1981, Curran died of lung cancer; she was living in Boston at the time. Her writings, both published and unpublished, were left to her friends Anne Halley and Jules Chametzky. As a part of its "Contemporary Classics by Women" collection, the Feminist Press reissued The Parish and the Hill in 1986, and then again in 2002. The 2002 edition includes an afterward written by Anne Halley, once a student of Curran's, but a close friend in later years. The proceeds from these publications were aimed toward funding a prize for a woman author with a disability, which was a request outlined in Curran's will.
