Marie-Térèse Baird
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Marie-Térèse Baird | |
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| Born | April 16, 1918 Antwerp, Belgium |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Novelist |
Marie-Térèse Baird was a Belgian-born British novelist. She is best-known for her 1973 novel A Lesson in Love, upon which was based the 1981 film Circle of Two (also distributed under the title Obsession), directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Burton and Tatum O'Neal.
Personal life
Marie-Térèse Verellen was born on April 16, 1918 in Antwerp, Belgium, where she attended convent schools. She married her second husband, Nigel Baird, and moved to Upper Woolhampton, Berkshire, England in 1939.[1][2].
Selected works
- The Scorpions. London: Macmillan. 1961.[3][4]
- A Lesson in Love. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1973.
- A Shining Furrow. London: Collins. 1973. ISBN 978-0002218542.
- The Birds of Sadness. London: St. Martin’s Press. 1986. ISBN 9780709025771.
- The Honeysuckle and The Rose. London: Robert Hale. 1988. ISBN 9780709031178.
Critical reception
Her first novel The Scorpions, was well received. A reviewer in The Sphere considered it "promising", saying that "Mrs. Baird has an easy, almost conversational style and considerable dexterity in the handling of her plot."[3] Another reviewer described it as "very well trimmed and cultivated .... The portraits of the matriarch and her three daughters ... are brilliantly done."[4] The anonymous reviewer in Kirkus Reviews suggests that, in A Lesson in Love, Baird wrote an emotionally affecting story while avoiding some of the pitfalls of portraying the fleeting nature of an April December romance, "[I]t is a temporal business at best and, to Mrs. Baird's credit, she has avoided much of the gumminess the situation invites [...] Sentimentally it's susceptible stuff -- to be read with a catch in the throat."[5]
Reviews during Baird's writing career suggested that she keenly observed characters' unique points of view as shaped by their stages in life. Martin Levin in The New York Times suggested that Baird's experience as a mother gave her the insight to create a convincing portrayal of her young protagonist, Sarah, in A Lesson in Love: "Mrs. Baird, a mother of eight, does a pretty good job of characterizing nervy Sarah."[6] Baird's later novel, The Birds of Sadness, was singled out from three other contemporary novels for how well Baird portrayed old age, "The most fully developed and most memorable evocation of the experience of being an old woman is Marie-Térèse Baird's The Birds of Sadness."[7]
References
- ↑ "Marie-Terese Baird". Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Gale. Retrieved September 30, 2024.
- ↑ Baird, Marie-Térèse (1973). A Shining Furrow. London: Collins. pp. Book jacket. ISBN 978-0002218542.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Fane, Vernon (13 May 1961). "The Reader's Taste". The Sphere. p. 31. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Whately, Rosaleen (31 May 1961). "Wealthy wives who devoured their husbands". Liverpool Daily Post. p. 9. Retrieved 24 December 2024.
- ↑ "Book Review: A Lesson in Love". Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved 2024-09-30.
- ↑ Levin, Martin (February 24, 1974). "New & Novel". The New York Times.
- ↑ Applebaum, Robert; Sohngen, Mary (April 1988). "The Survivors: The Experiences of Old Women In Current Novels". The Gerontologist. 28 (2): 282–283. doi:10.1093/geront/28.2.282.
External links
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