Maureen Howard
[2] Her mother, Loretta (née Burns), was a homemaker and the daughter of an Irish immigrant who amassed a fortune from land development and owning an asphalt plant.
[3] Howard credited her mother with exposing her to fine arts, enrolling her in lessons for ballet, piano, and elocution,[3] in contrast to the experience with her father.
[9] In 1960, Howard published her first novel, Not a Word About Nightingales, which drew on her familiarity with academia to tell the story of a professor who decides to abandon family, job, and country while on sabbatical in Italy.
Structured as a series of journal entries, it tells the story of an Irish-American woman who escapes her hometown of Bridgeport for New York City, where she pursues an independent life.
Remarking on it in The Washington Post in 1982, Grumbach called it "one of the most astutely funny novels of our time",[15] while, a decade later, the scholar and critic Noel Perrin said it was "stunningly good".
[16] In 2001, the critic John Leonard lamented that it had been "published a couple of years too early" to benefit from the attention paid to second-wave feminism, despite being a "feminist novel".
Writing in The New York Times, Grumbach called Howard an "extraordinarily talented writer" and the novel a "further display of her sane, evocative, simple, and exact prose".
[29] The author John Casey, writing in The New York Times, compared reading Natural History to "watching a display of the Aurora Borealis.
[33] She then began to write a quartet of books inspired by the four seasons: A Lover's Almanac (1998), The Silver Screen (2004), and The Rags of Time (2009), and the collection of novellas called Big as Life: Three Tales for Spring (2001).
In 2010, reflecting on all of the books as a "great sequence-novel in four parts", the critic Sophia Lear, writing in The New Republic, praised them as "a beautifully integrated whole" whose "real subject" is "the artistic endeavor itself".
[37] Reviewing Big as Life in The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Potts argued that "Howard's style can sometimes be too elliptical for its own good", although he still found the book to be full of "subtlety and grace".
[44] Howard's body of work spans fiction and nonfiction, including short stories, autobiography, essays, and book reviews, but novels comprise the majority of her literary output.
[45] The critic Richard Eder summarized her fiction as "a chronological whirligig, with events as likely to be told after their consequences as before and sometimes simultaneously", her stories are "mixed up for a reader to assemble".
[46] The scholar David Madden notes that Howard's works "abound in various, competing voices with multiple first-person narrators, including the author herself".
[47] For the scholar Charles Fanning, Howard's approach to literary form demonstrates her belief that "experience is too tricky and fascinating, too full, for straightforward narrative.
[48] Critics have noted that Howard's novels tend to minimize plot, focusing instead on an attempt to capture characters and "an accumulation of moments",[34] or what Keefe Durso has termed "landscapes of memory".
[47] Scholars and critics have tended to focus on Howard's concern with the Irish-American experience and its related themes of identity, family, history, and religion.
Keefe Durso argues that these themes "are all present to one degree or another in Howard's work, but religion and family dominate her thematic landscape".
[45] The scholar Sally Barr Ebest has noted that, in this, Howard's work has much in common with the novels of other Irish-American women writers, which are immersed in Catholic culture.
[51] Keefe Durso echoes this notion, stating that Howard's work demonstrates that when "the past is honestly examined and historical truths are confronted…growth will be possible".
