Love and Work on Two Sides of the Atlantic
Leaving Home Creates Another Place to Miss
Eilis Lacey does not begin Brooklyn with a grand ambition to reinvent herself. Opportunities in her Irish hometown are limited, and other people can see a future for her in America before she can imagine it clearly. Colm Tóibín’s 2009 novel follows her from Enniscorthy to New York in the early 1950s, attending to the practical arrangements and unspoken feelings that make the journey possible. Work, education and romance gradually give her a life that once seemed remote. Yet making a home elsewhere does not remove the claims of the place she has left. The novel’s central tension grows from having genuine attachments on both sides of the Atlantic and finding that affection cannot make every obligation compatible.
A Future Arranged by Other People
Eilis lives with her mother and older sister Rose in Enniscorthy. Her mathematical ability has not translated into the employment she wants, and she accepts work at Miss Kelly’s grocery shop. The job places her within a small social hierarchy controlled by an employer who can make favours feel like obligations.
Miss Kelly’s treatment of customers teaches Eilis how much everyday life depends on status. Access and courtesy are distributed unevenly. Work does not simply provide an income; it puts her in a position where another person decides how she should behave and how grateful she should be.
Rose recognises the limits of this future. With Father Flood, an Irish priest based in Brooklyn, she helps arrange work and accommodation in America. The prospect takes shape through conversations and practical decisions that Eilis has not initiated.
Her acceptance should not be mistaken for an absence of feeling. She understands that people are making an effort on her behalf, which makes reluctance difficult to express. Rejecting the opportunity could sound like rejecting their care or failing to appreciate a chance she may not receive again.
The arrangement also redistributes responsibilities within the family. Eilis can leave partly because Rose remains. The move is presented as an opportunity for one sister, but it is supported by the continuing presence of the other beside their mother.
Tóibín gives this kind of unspoken arrangement weight without requiring an explicit family contract. The characters can understand what is expected while avoiding a conversation that would make the cost harder to bear. Silence allows the plan to proceed.
Eilis’s journey therefore begins before the ship leaves. She is already entering a future whose practical details are clearer than her own wishes. The novel’s interest lies in how she gradually acquires preferences within a life she has initially agreed to rather than actively designed.
Arrival Does Not Immediately Mean Belonging
The Atlantic crossing makes Eilis’s inexperience painfully apparent. Georgina, a more experienced traveller, helps her manage the voyage and prepare for arrival. A stranger’s practical knowledge becomes valuable precisely because the family’s careful arrangements cannot accompany her through every unfamiliar situation.
In Brooklyn, Eilis moves into Mrs Kehoe’s boarding house and works at Bartocci’s department store. These settings provide structure, company and income, but they also require her to learn rules she does not yet understand. Being physically settled is not the same as feeling at home.
The boarding house gives her a community within which she can remain recognisably Irish. It also subjects her to observation, comparison and gossip. Support and scrutiny arrive together, making privacy something she must negotiate rather than assume.
Homesickness becomes overwhelming after letters from home bring the absent people vividly into her new routine. The letters do what they are meant to do by maintaining connection, yet the connection also makes separation harder to bear. Affection can intensify pain without being a mistake.
Father Flood helps by arranging bookkeeping classes. Education offers Eilis a future that can be approached through specific work rather than endured as a vague promise that things will improve. Her ability begins to connect with a possible professional identity.
This development is essential to the novel’s account of belonging. Eilis does not become comfortable solely because she meets a man. Before romance can carry that much meaning, work and study give her reasons to imagine herself remaining in Brooklyn.
The Christmas meal for isolated Irish men complicates any simple account of successful emigration. Their presence offers a glimpse of lives that have not become secure through crossing the ocean. Eilis can recognise something familiar in people who are also warnings against treating America as an automatic solution.
The episode places her homesickness within a wider community without making the experiences identical. She has youth, help and prospects that others lack. Her discomfort is real, but the novel also shows the material support that may allow her to move through it.
Tony and a Life That Becomes Particular
Eilis meets Tony, an Italian American plumber, at a dance. His attention is direct and his enthusiasm gives their relationship a warmth different from the guarded negotiations of her earlier life. Spending time with him makes Brooklyn a place associated with particular shared experiences.
Tony is quicker to declare his feelings than Eilis. Her hesitation does not simply mean she feels nothing. Words such as love carry an implied future, and she needs time to discover whether she can inhabit the future he is already imagining.
Their different pace gives the courtship an important imbalance without making Tony an enemy. He can be kind and sincere while wanting certainty she is not immediately ready to provide. The relationship asks Eilis to move from accepting attention to expressing a commitment of her own.
Meeting his family widens her American life beyond the Irish networks that first made the move possible. Familiarity grows through meals, outings and ordinary time together. A city that initially existed as an intimidating whole becomes a series of places where she knows what she is doing and whom she expects to see.
Her studies develop alongside the romance. Passing her bookkeeping examinations matters because it gives her competence that does not depend on Tony’s affection. She is becoming employable in the way she wanted before leaving Ireland, even while her emotional life changes.
Tony’s family plans suggest a future involving work, property and shared responsibilities. Marriage can therefore be imagined as part of a practical arrangement as well as a romantic one. Eilis’s skills have a place within that future, although imagining it does not settle every question about whether she wants it.
The title’s choice of Brooklyn rather than America suits this process. Eilis is learning to inhabit a particular network of streets, rooms, work and relationships, not simply adopting an abstract national dream. Her new life becomes credible when it acquires a local scale. That makes the later division especially painful: she will not be choosing between one real home and a vague idea of opportunity, but between two places in which ordinary days have become imaginable.
The novel makes attachment cumulative. Brooklyn becomes meaningful through repeated actions rather than a single conversion from homesickness to happiness. That gradual change will make the later return to Ireland difficult: Eilis will be leaving a life that has become real through use.
Rose’s Death Changes the Arrangement
News of Rose’s sudden death interrupts Eilis’s growing security. Her sister has helped make the American opportunity possible and has remained with their mother. Losing Rose therefore brings grief together with a practical question about who will now stay at home.
Distance changes what Eilis can do with that grief. She receives information about events she cannot participate in directly, and the family’s needs reach her through messages rather than shared daily experience. The ocean that once separated her from opportunity now separates her from responsibility.
Eilis decides to return for a visit. Before she leaves, Tony asks her to marry him, and they have a civil ceremony without informing her family. The marriage gives their relationship a binding form at the moment physical separation threatens its certainty.
Tony’s request contains both love and fear. He wants a future with Eilis, but the timing also reflects anxiety that Ireland may claim her again. Marriage becomes a way to secure a connection whose emotional strength cannot be tested simply by promises about a return date.
Eilis agrees, yet the secrecy means that her two lives do not share the same information. Tony understands her departure as a married woman’s visit home. Her mother and friends will receive someone whose American commitments remain largely unspecified.
This difference creates the conditions for the later conflict. Eilis does not need to tell a detailed lie at every encounter to allow a false understanding to develop. By withholding a single decisive fact, she permits other people to imagine a future in which she is available to stay.
The marriage also complicates any account of the novel as a straightforward choice between two equal romantic options. Once Eilis returns to Ireland, she carries an existing commitment. Her uncertainty can remain emotionally understandable without making that commitment disappear.
Home Offers What It Once Withheld
Returning to Enniscorthy brings Eilis into a household reorganised by absence. Her mother preserves Rose’s place and depends heavily on her surviving daughter’s company. Conversations about Eilis’s life in America do not develop in the way she might have prepared for them.
The silence is uncomfortable but convenient. Her mother can postpone confronting the life that will take Eilis away again, while Eilis can postpone explaining the marriage. Each gains temporary protection from information that would make the impending separation harder to avoid.
Eilis also returns with a confidence and experience that change how people see her. Temporary bookkeeping work in Rose’s former workplace makes use of the skills she has acquired. Employment she wanted before leaving now appears available at home.
That opportunity creates a painful paradox. America has helped make her into someone who can imagine a better Irish future. The country she left and the country she might now remain in are geographically the same, but her position within them has changed.
Jim Farrell also treats her differently from the young man who once seemed uninterested. Their growing connection offers affection within a familiar community. Staying could mean proximity to her mother, useful work and a relationship that fits easily into the expectations around her.
These attractions should not be reduced to a simple contest between Jim and Tony. Each man is connected to a whole possible arrangement of daily life. Eilis is responding to places, family obligations and versions of herself as well as to romantic feeling.
She extends her visit to attend her friend Nancy’s wedding. As time passes, Tony’s letters become easier to leave unanswered or unopened. The future waiting in Brooklyn begins to feel distant while the life directly around her acquires urgency and substance.
Avoidance now has consequences for other people. Jim cannot accurately judge the relationship because Eilis has withheld the marriage. Tony cannot understand the silence from the position in which she has left him. Her difficulty in choosing becomes a difficulty she is distributing to people who lack the relevant facts.
What Happens at the End of Brooklyn?
Miss Kelly summons Eilis and reveals that news of the marriage has reached her through a connection with Mrs Kehoe. The separation between Eilis’s Irish and American lives collapses. A fact she has been able to keep private is about to become part of the town’s knowledge.
Eilis arranges her return to Brooklyn and tells her mother that she is married. She leaves a note for Jim and departs. The novel closes with the journey away from Enniscorthy and her thoughts about the message she has left behind, rather than showing a reunion with Tony in New York.
The decision resolves where she is going without providing complete certainty about how she will feel once she arrives. Returning to her husband is an action. Whether all her conflicting desires have settled into harmony is a separate question the novel does not answer for her.
Miss Kelly’s intervention is coercive, but the information she possesses is true. Eilis has not been falsely accused of a commitment she never made. The threat of exposure forces her to face the difference between the freedom she has been imagining and the obligations already shaping her choices.
Her mother’s response also belongs to a changed reality. The possibility of keeping Eilis close can no longer be sustained by leaving America out of the conversation. Naming the marriage brings the distant life into the room, where it can no longer be treated as an indefinite arrangement.
Jim is left with a message rather than a full conversation. That ending preserves the emotional cost of Eilis’s method of departure. She can leave before she has to witness every consequence of the hope she has encouraged, but absence does not mean the consequence has been erased.
The last movement returns the reader to the distance between inner feeling and outward action. Eilis may have thoughts she cannot easily communicate, yet the people around her must live with what she actually says and does. Tóibín lets us understand her uncertainty without making understanding equivalent to exoneration.
Why the Choice Remains Uncomfortable
Calling Eilis passive captures something about how often other people arrange the circumstances of her life. It does not fully describe her conduct. She accepts proposals, withholds information, prolongs a visit and allows relationships to develop. These are actions even when she avoids presenting them to herself as decisive choices.
Her silence changes across the novel. Early on, it helps her accommodate the kindness and expectations of people arranging an opportunity. Later, it enables contradictory understandings of her life to continue. The same reluctance to cause distress becomes more harmful as the facts being withheld become more consequential.
Miss Kelly and Mrs Kehoe connect the two shores in a way that challenges the promise of starting again. Emigration has expanded Eilis’s possibilities, but it has not created an entirely private world. The networks that help people find work and housing can also carry judgement and intimate information.
That double function prevents community from being either a simple refuge or a simple prison. Eilis benefits from relationships that know who she is and where she comes from. She also discovers how little control she may have over what those relationships disclose about her.
Rose’s absence remains crucial because Eilis cannot return to the home she originally left. The person who made departure possible is no longer there. Staying would involve entering parts of Rose’s practical role, while leaving requires accepting that the original family arrangement cannot be restored.
The ending also leaves room for grief that has no single object. Eilis can mourn Rose, miss Tony, care for Jim and dread leaving her mother without one feeling making the others false. The problem is that the actions available to her cannot satisfy all those attachments at once.
The novel’s restraint protects that difficulty. Showing a completely assured future could allow the reader to treat the discarded possibility as an illusion that never mattered. Ending with departure keeps the abandoned life emotionally present, even after Eilis has committed herself to another destination.
How the 2015 Film Changes the Ending
John Crowley’s 2015 film, written by Nick Hornby and starring Saoirse Ronan, follows the novel’s central movement between Ireland and Brooklyn. It gives the final choice a more visible declaration and takes Eilis further along the return journey.
In the confrontation with Miss Kelly, the film’s Eilis asserts her married identity. Her response makes the scene an act of resistance as well as an exposure of secrecy. She does not simply withdraw under the pressure of what Miss Kelly knows.
The adaptation then shows Eilis crossing the Atlantic again. She offers advice to another young traveller, echoing the help Georgina gave her on the outward voyage. The scene makes her changed position concrete: she now possesses knowledge useful to someone at the beginning of the same difficult transition.
Finally, she reunites with Tony in Brooklyn. The embrace supplies an arrival that the novel withholds. The audience sees her reach the relationship to which she has chosen to return rather than having to imagine the immediate meeting.
The change creates greater closure, but it does not cancel the cost of leaving Ireland. Her mother remains without her, Jim has been hurt and Rose cannot be recovered. A visible reunion can confirm one bond without making the others insignificant.
The distinction is useful when remembering the ending. The New York embrace belongs to the film; the novel ends before it. Importing that scene into an explanation of Tóibín’s book removes part of the uncertainty that its stopping point preserves.
Brooklyn makes leaving an ongoing condition rather than a single brave moment. Eilis gains skills, love and a possible future abroad, then discovers that returning home can create another persuasive life. Her final departure gives the story a direction without pretending that one country has become meaningless. The novel ends with the cost still close enough to feel, while the film lets us see the person waiting at the other end of the journey.
Sources
Brooklyn — Colm Tóibín — Author’s book page and excerpt supporting the novel’s identity and opening setting.
Brooklyn Plot Summary — LitCharts — Novel reference for Eilis’s relationships, return to Ireland and departure.
Brooklyn Summary and Study Guide — SuperSummary — Independent account used to check work, study, family arrangements and the final choice.
Brooklyn Part IV Summary and Analysis — GradeSaver — Detailed account of the Irish return, withheld marriage and ending.
Brooklyn Production Notes — Transmission Films — Official film credits and synopsis used to distinguish the adaptation.
How Is the Film Adaptation of Brooklyn Different From the Book? — The Take — Comparison of the Miss Kelly confrontation and the film’s added reunion, including reported comments from director John Crowley.
Brooklyn (film) — Wikipedia — Secondary corroboration of the shipboard advice and New York reunion.
