This is a raw, powerful account of a lonely life. In Judith we have a middle-aged woman in straitened circumstances, who lost her youth to caring for an aged and difficult aunt. Once her aunt died, she had rather missed the boat. A career, the prospect of marriage have all vanished, together with her confidence. She moves from boarding house to boarding house, and teaches a few - a very few - hours of piano. Her only social life is to visit the O'Neill family on Sunday, after Mass. And they dread those visits. This is the story of her disintegration. Inept at reading social clues, she imagines a fellow resident at her current boarding house is interested in marrying her. He isn't. And things go from bad to worse ...

It's excruciating. It's depressing. It's sad. But it's compelling too. Here's a man who remembers the torments that most of us go through as teenagers, re-enacted in the mind of a middle-aged woman. Somehow, Brian Moore has passed me by till now. No longer. ( )

Other reviewers here have mentioned that "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" is an extremely sad book, and they're hardly wrong to say so. What I really enjoyed about this book, though, was that Judy -- though she herself might not appreciate our overly familiar tone -- is that she isn't merely the victim of a cold, unwelcoming world. Yes, the author portrays Belfast as a small, rather boring place riven by social divisions, and Ms. Hearne herself is the product of an idea of upper-class femininity that was, as of the fifties, was rapidly becoming outmoded. Her ladies' education hasn't gotten her too far in life. While forgoing marriage to take care of an ailing aunt turns out to be a disastrous choice, the author is understanding enough of his protagonist to make clear that there were few good options available to Judy's only close relation. Even so, Ms. Hearne herself has her faults. She's inherited the biases natural to her class and refused to examine them. She seems stuck in mental and emotional patterns that she's either unwilling or unable to break. She daydreams but refuses to act. You can call the characters in this novel who find her dull or faintly ridiculous unkind, but they're handly wrong. Judy, and her life, are terribly boring, and she doesn't really do enough to change it. Predictably enough, things end badly.

Mary Gordon suggests that "The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" was written, as was much of the Irish literature of this period, under the star of Joyce, and while there is the stray free-flowing description here along with a few thematic similarities, I think that Moore's novel is really an altogether different sort of creature. His prose here is economical, almost cutting: a far cry from Jim's more lyrical moods. Lovers of period slang will enjoy returned Yankified returned Irishman James Madden's New York dialect, which is rendered so perfectly it often seems like he just stepped out of a film noir. His own truncated, spectacularly unsuccessful courtship of the titular character is, by way of closing, another one of this novel's principal attractions. Less a folie a deux than a dramatic mismatch of mercenary personal interests, it provides the perfect opportunity for the author to demonstrate what can happen when you remain trapped in your own badly calibrated perceptions. A rom-com in reverse, Judy and Jim's attempt at a love affair ends badly, too. It's not for the clinically depressed or the unshakably optimistic, but this one's a very good novel nonetheless. ( )

The kind of quietly devastating book that you finish and then need to just sit and stare at a blank wall for a moment while saying "oof" softly to yourself. Brian Moore's portrait of the chronically lonely Judith Hearne, a 40-something spinster clinging desperately to her fading gentility in 1950s Belfast is a well-observed one: a bleak look at woman imprisoning herself in a grisaille world. ( )

This book is at times darkly humorous, and other times so damn sad I could hardly believe I was interested. Depressing books that are depressing for no good reason, I hate. But this, this book presented a character with whom I had nearly nothing in common and, despite that, I felt for her, I loved her, even though I knew she was hopeless. Even when I found her mishaps excruciatingly sad and humiliating. It's hard to put into words how this book immerses you without completely draining you. It has something to do with the richness of each character (especially Ms. Hearne, of course) and the depth and detail and personality of the story telling. You definitely become part of Judith Hearne's world, every bit of it. You practically feel like a gossipy citizen of the small Irish town by the time you're through.

With that said, I'm going to quote the best damn review of this book that ever existed (by Goodreads member Hannah Messler):

"Oh sweet lord if there is a more excruciatingly, exquisitely, exactingly, deliriously wretched little book out there, I don't think I could even handle it.

What an absolute motherfucking masterpiece."
( )

This was a fabulous read: set in a grim Belfast boarding house in the 1950s, where new arrival Miss Hearne strives to appear genteel, while barely having enough to eat. Plain, on the shelf and alone, with little chance of an income, she yearns for love and strives to keep her Catholic faith ...and avoid the demon drink. But into the story comes her landlady's brother, just returned from the US..
Such a sad, hopeless tale; the almost hysterical stream-of-consciousness passages, relating the inner thoughts of someone on the edge of a breakdowm, recalled Jean Rhys' superb "Good Morning, Midnight."
Highly recommended. ( )