I Am Mary Dunne

I Am Mary Dunne (1968) is a novel by Brian Moore about one day in the life of a beautiful and well-to-do 31 year-old Canadian woman living in New York City with her third husband, a successful playwright. Triggered by seemingly unimportant occurrences, the protagonist / first person narrator remembers her past in a series of flashbacks, which reveal her insecurities, her bad conscience concerning her first two husbands, and her fear that she is on the brink of insanity.

Of all of Moore's books, I Am Mary Dunne has been described as "perhaps his best novel" in The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (ed. Ian Ousby, 1988).

Read on

• One of the classic stream of consciousness novels set during only one day is Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925), where preparations for a party open the floodgates of memory for the female protagonist.
• In Virginia (1913), the wife of a successful playwright is also overshadowed by her husband.
• John Braine's novel The Jealous God (1964) is also about someone trying to get over their Christian upbringing in the face of seemingly ubiquitous hypocrisy and double standards of morality.
• In Bharati Mukherjee's novel Jasmine (1989) there is also a woman who frequently changes her identity in order to adapt to her surroundings.
• William Shakespeare's Sonnet CXXXVIII (1609) ("When my love swears that she is made of truth …") sums up Mary's relationship with her second husband, Hat.
• See Heroines in literature for an overview of female protagonists.