O'Farrell, Mary Ann

PERSONAL:

Female.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, Texas A&M University, 221C Blocker Bldg. (MS 4227), College Station, TX 77843. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Texas A&M University, College Station, associate professor of English and associate director of Center for Humanities Studies.

WRITINGS:

Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1997.

(Editor, with Lynne Vallone, and contributor) Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1999.

Contributor to books, including Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, edited by Deidre Lynch, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2000; Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, edited by Lauren Berlant, Routledge (New York, NY), 2004; and Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real World Writing, Writing the Real World, edited by Janis Stout, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 2005. Contributor to periodicals, including Novel, Henry James Review, and Literature and Medicine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mary Ann O'Farrell, an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University who frequently writes about gender studies and the convention of manners, is the author of Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush. The work "uses the figure of the blush as a point of departure in order to provide us with a finely nuanced and happily perverse way of reading the body in the novel," noted Kelly Hager in Victorian Studies. Hager added that the author "interprets the blush as a sign of the body's complicity with the social network of the nineteenth-century English novel in which it so often appears and as a sign of the pleasures the blush occasions and is occasioned by. Such an approach gets the body back into the novel, and that is, in short, O'Farrell's aim." According to Gil Haroian-Guerin, reviewing Telling Complexions in Studies in the Novel, "O'Farrell considers that the blush is an author's means of rendering the body legible, of expressing both erotic desires and social obligations, which renders the blush ‘an instrument of watchful estimation’ in certain literary and popular works." In particular, Haroian-Guerin noted O'Farrell's reading of one of Jane Austen's best-known works. "Through the novel application of her blush theory to Pride and Prejudice," the critic stated, "O'Farrell succeeds in revealing new, illuminating details on Austen's efforts to explore the body's place in social order, particularly the erotic blush's ability to aid in the social arrangement of bodies into ‘marriageable pairs.’" Telling Complexions, in the words of Romantic Circles Reviews Web site contributor Laura Mooneyham White, "works out the language of the blush in the English novel as eloquently as it can be interpreted."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Studies in the Novel, spring, 1999, Gil Haroian-Guerin, review of Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush, p. 120.

Victorian Studies, spring, 1998, Kelly Hager, review of Telling Complexions, p. 499.

ONLINE

Romantic Circles Reviews,http://www.rc.umd.edu/reviews/ (March 13, 2000), Laura Mooneyham White, "On Mary Ann O'Farrell's Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush."

Texas A&M University Web site,http://www.tamu.edu/ (March 20, 2007), "Mary Ann O'Farrell."