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Miss Fortini
Mrs. Kehoe is the owner of the house that Eilis lives in when she comes to Brooklyn. An Irish woman herself, Mrs. Kehoe takes a liking to Eilis because she’s polite and well-behaved. Because of this, she treats Eilis as her favorite resident, giving her the best room in the house when Miss Keegan abruptly moves out. This, however, causes tension between Eilis and the other boarders, so Eilis comes to resent Mrs. Kehoe for putting her in such an uncomfortable position. In turn, this situation also puts a strain on her relationship with Mrs. Kehoe, who thinks that Eilis is ungrateful. A stern woman, Mrs. Kehoe doesn’t allow any of her residents to bring male visitors to the house, so she’s surprised when Tony comes to fetch Eilis one night. However, she uses this opportunity to ask him as many questions as she can before Eilis arrives at the front door and ushers Tony into the street. Later, when Tony and Eilis have sex in the basement room, it’s clear that Mrs. Kehoe has heard them, considering that she decides to put a lock on the basement, forcing Eilis to enter through the front door instead of the separate entrance. Despite this tension, though, Eilis manages to patch up her relationship with Mrs. Kehoe by simply showing her that she’s willing to put aside their differences. However, Mrs. Kehoe later poses a problem for Eilis when she tells Miss Kelly (who is apparently her cousin) that Eilis is in a relationship with Tony—information that Miss Kelly wields against her, since she knows that Eilis has been seeing Jim Farrell during her extended visit to Ireland.
Mrs. Kehoe Quotes in Brooklyn
The Brooklyn quotes below are all either spoken by Mrs. Kehoe or refer to Mrs. Kehoe. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part Four
Quotes
Upstairs on the bed Eilis found two letters from Tony and she realized, almost with a start, that she had not written to him as she had intended. She looked at the two envelopes, at his handwriting, and she stood in the room with the door closed wondering how strange it was that everything about him seemed remote. And not only that, but everything else that had happened in Brooklyn seemed as though it had almost dissolved and was no longer richly present for her—her room in Mrs. Kehoe’s, for example, or her exams, or the trolley-car from Brooklyn College back home, or the dancehall, or the apartment where Tony lived with his parents and his three brothers, or the shop floor at Bartocci’s. She went through all of it as though she were trying to recover what had seemed so filled with detail, so solid, just a few weeks before.
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Mrs. Kehoe Quotes in Brooklyn
The Brooklyn quotes below are all either spoken by Mrs. Kehoe or refer to Mrs. Kehoe. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Part Four
Quotes
Upstairs on the bed Eilis found two letters from Tony and she realized, almost with a start, that she had not written to him as she had intended. She looked at the two envelopes, at his handwriting, and she stood in the room with the door closed wondering how strange it was that everything about him seemed remote. And not only that, but everything else that had happened in Brooklyn seemed as though it had almost dissolved and was no longer richly present for her—her room in Mrs. Kehoe’s, for example, or her exams, or the trolley-car from Brooklyn College back home, or the dancehall, or the apartment where Tony lived with his parents and his three brothers, or the shop floor at Bartocci’s. She went through all of it as though she were trying to recover what had seemed so filled with detail, so solid, just a few weeks before.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
