[4] As O Jeonghui matured as a writer, her work became increasingly non-imagistic and centered on the idea of family life as a trap for women.

[5] From 1990 on, O Jeonghui has published only sporadically, including one work of children's fiction, Song-I, It's Morning Outside the Door.

[6] O was a key member of the Arts Council of Korea during the Park Geun-hye administration, which was found to have compiled a blacklist of artists and authors who were considered leftist and cut them off from public exhibitions and government funding.

[7] O Jeonghui has received both the Yi Sang Literary Award and the Dong-in Literary Award, South Korea's most prestigious prizes for short fiction, and her works have been translated into multiple foreign languages in Southeast Asia, Latin America, the United States, and Europe.

As the story begins, Se-jung ponders the latest in a series of his wife's disappearances, the first of which occurred a mere six months after their marriage.

[9] Ŭn-su's continued betrayal of the family bond strains everyone, yet she is unable to control the winds that drive her.

After killing a burglar, and spending two years in a mental hospital, Hye-Ja returns to a world that wants no part of her.

Both women have lost their husbands at an early age, and in a culture that is historically inimical to widows, this is a social kiss of death.

In The Bronze Mirror an elderly couple live with memory of their son, killed twenty years earlier in the April 1960 student revolution.